Disney CEO Bob Iger brought in a large sum of money last year, despite overseeing one of the Hollywood studio’s worst years of box office failures.
Iger was paid a total sum of nearly $31.6 million in 2023, including a $865,385 base salary, $16.1 million in stock awards, $10 million in stock option awards, $2.1 million in performance-based compensation, and $2.48 million in other compensation, CNN reported on Jan. 16.
This amount is more than double the $15 million paycheck he made the previous year, when he unexpectedly reassumed his CEO position and ousted Bob Chapek from the role in November 2022. Before his second tenure, Iger served as CEO of the Walt Disney Company from 2005 to 2020.
Despite the significant increase in pay last year, it’s still less than the $45.9 million Iger received during his last full year of employment as executive chairman and chairman of the board in 2021.
However, while raking in his latest hefty paycheck, Iger presided over Disney’s historically worst year in financial losses.
By August, Disney lost at least $965 million from three films and a streaming series, according to Forbes. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” “The Little Mermaid” live-action remake, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” and “Secret Invasion” were four of the studio’s biggest flops in 2023.
Accounting for all theatrical releases though, the losses have been projected to be even higher.
In a YouTube video, box office analyst OMB Reviews calculated that Disney lost “close to $1.5 billion” based on each movie’s reported production budget, which he said might be higher than Disney lets on.
“The best argument you can make is that they lost close to a billion dollars when, in reality, you’re looking at probably somewhere closer to $1.2 to $1.8 billion dollars in financial losses, especially as we get closer to what the actual budgets for these movies were,” he said.
Did you enjoy any Disney movies from 2023?
“Basically, the news of Disney for this past year is this: None of their movies made money and the only one that conceivably made any money barely made any and hardly made enough to pay for any other projects going forward,” the YouTuber concluded. “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” only made $4 million in profits, he noted.
Although Disney earned about $4.83 billion in global box office earnings in 2023, its profits were low enough that Universal Studios took the top spot for highest-grossing studio of the year, Variety reported. Universal raked in $4.91 billion, bumping Disney to second place.
“Being the No. 1 studio globally for seven consecutive years out of the last eight is pretty remarkable by any measure and is something of which we are all incredibly proud,” said Disney senior vice president of studio distribution Tony Chambers, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Moreover, Disney’s financial struggles last year were also made apparent in its layoff of 7,000 employees globally, its unprecedentedly low stock shares, and its mass exodus of millions of Disney+ subscribers.
Still, Iger was compensated substantially during his first full year back as CEO.
Notably, news of Iger’s massive pay package was reportedly not welcome among Disney employees.
Fox Business reporter Charles Gasparino posted on X that there is “massive dissension particularly at @ABC following word that @Disney has doubled the salary of @RobertIger while he has froze salaries, eliminated bonuses and plans another round of layoffs at the network among producers.”
“I’ve never seen [morale] this low,” one producer told Gasparino.
