Disney is the most powerful entertainment company in the world, bar none. It owns around 40 percent of the film market, it’s already broken the record for most money made by a studio in a single year and it’s only September, and it’s behind six of the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time…and it recently bought that studio that made a seventh.
I know what you’re thinking: why is Disney thinking so small? Well, at one time, the company had loftier goals.
Vanity Fair has published an excerpt from The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons From 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company, written by Disney chief Bob Iger and on store shelves now. In it, Iger talks about the lost dream of merging Disney with Apple, another titanic company with a death grip on American wallets. The reason it didn’t happen was due to the death of Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2011. “I believe that if Steve were still alive, we would have combined our companies, or at least discussed the possibility very seriously,” Iger writes.
Can you imagine? Would Avengers: Endgame have premiered exclusively on iPhones?
Iger and Jobs had a friendly business relationship. According to Iger, back when Michael Eiser was running Disney, there was some bad blood between the companies, mainly because of how Disney treated Pixar, which Apple had funded and effectively owned since its Toy Story days. Iger turned that around and purchased Pixar in 2006, two years after “Steve made a very public, in-your-face announcement that he would never deal with Disney again.”
“With every success the company has had since Steve’s death, there’s always a moment in the midst of my excitement when I think, ‘I wish Steve could be here for this,’” Iger wrote.
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I’m glad the two of them sound like they had a good relationship, but there’s a part of me that’s very relieved a Disney-Apple merger didn’t come to pass. Disney is powerful enough.
Then again, if the two companies had merged, maybe Disney would have gone in a different direction and not felt the need to buy studios like LucasFilm and 20th Century Fox. Clearly, Iger had made up his mind to become the most powerful player in the game, one way or another.
For better or worse, the companies are now competing for streaming dominance, with Disney set to release its Disney+ service on November 12 and Apple launching its Apple TV + (really creative naming here, guys) just a day later on November 13.
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h/t Variety