Bob Iger on “Woke Disney’ Criticism: “I Think a Lot of People Don’t Even Understand Really What It Means”

In the last few years, Disney has been increasingly accused of being woke and destroying both MCU and Star Wars franchises with “wokeness.” Fans cannot ignore the fact that a lot more projects have female leads, gender-swapped characters, or race-swapped characters. While part of the fandom considers this incredibly insulting to the legacy of comic books, the other side of the fandom greets the change with open arms ready to fully embrace this new direction in entertainment.

Last year, ‘The Marvels’ broke one of the most infamous records a movie can break, it was the lowest-grossing MCU movie in history not even being able to gross $100 million at the box office domestically. Then ‘Madame Web’ flopped (unrelated to Disney), what do the two projects have in common? Both had female leads.

Then there’s the Star Wars Universe and “The Force is Female” mantra, while I do have to agree that some of the hate these projects get are purely hateful in nature, you also can’t deny that the quality of writing reached abysmally bad levels with watered down stories while the most interesting thing about the character should be the fact that they are presumably female – a kickass rude female at that, but this is something to discuss at another time.

Yesterday, the casting for Silver Surfer was announced, and it’s going to be a female version of Silver Surfer played by Julia Garner, as you can imagine the majority of the comments are negative, once again chanting “woke” “woke “woke.” Every other comment is about Disney being woke.

The term has been used so much that Bob Iger decided to weigh in on it. Recently he also claimed that Disney isn’t trying to push any kind of agenda, which personally I find extremely hard to believe. Now Iger claims that people using the term woke don’t even know what it means.

the term woke is thrown around rather liberally, no pun intended in that regard. I think a lot of people don’t even understand really what it means

One thing that Iger did not claim is that the claims that Disney is woke are without merit.

I think the noise is sort of quieted down. I’ve been preaching this for a long time at the company before I left and since I came back then our number one goal is to entertain. The bottom line is that infusing messaging as a sort of a number one priority in our films and TV shows is not what we’re up to. They need to be entertaining, and where the Disney company can have a positive impact on the world whether it’s you know, fostering acceptance and understanding of people of all different types, great.

Iger also added that their messages are trying to reach a very diverse audience, which explains why they are sometimes blatantly “woke.”

But generally speaking, we need to be an entertainment first company … And understanding that look, we’re trying to reach a very, very diverse audience. And on one hand in order to do that, what you do, the stories you tell, have to really reflect the audience that you’re trying to reach, but that audience because they are so diverse, really, first and foremost, they want to be entertained, and sometimes they can’t be turned off by certain things. And we just have to be more sensitive to the interest of a broad audience. It’s not easy, you know, so that he can’t please everybody all the time, right?

I don’t think that “reaching a diverse audience” should come at the expense of the majority of your audience, but this is just my personal opinion. Box office results tell their own stories, people are not happy with current Disney, be it Star Wars, MCU, or Disney’s fantasy animated projects in fact, 2023 was the first year in recent times that Disney did not have a billion-dollar project at the box office, all of their projects somewhat floped which is cleary indicator that when you try to adjust the story for everyone, no one is really interested in it, as I’ve mentioned before, it gets watered down, gender, race, or any other characteristic isn’t inherently interesting; it’s character development that truly matters, and unfortunately, we’re seeing less of that.

What’s your opinion? Let us know in the comments below!