“You broke my heart.”
That’s what former Marvel Entertainment chairman and CEO Ike Perlmutter said to Bob Iger, according to The Wall Street Journal, when Iger made it clear in 2015 that he was not going to name veteran Disney executive and Perlmutter favorite Jay Rasulo as his eventual successor. (He anointed Tom Staggs instead, and Staggs was out the following year. Being a potential successor was hazardous duty at Disney, at least in those days.)
Iger’s relationship with Perlmutter went sharply downhill from there and last March, after incrementally stripping Perlmutter of his duties at Marvel, Iger ejected the contentious billionaire from the company altogether. Even before that happened, Perlmutter had backed his friend and Palm Beach neighbor, Nelson Peltz, in his quest for a seat on Disney’s board, which Peltz and Perlmutter argue is too cozy with Iger to be effective.
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Peltz dropped that first run at Disney after Iger pledged to slash costs and lay off thousands of employees. But with Disney stock still languishing, Peltz and Perlmutter are back, having added Rasulo to the team. The goal is to get board seats for both Peltz and Rasulo and — one must suspect — eventually to install Rasulo in the CEO job that eluded him years ago. Presented with Peltz’s first run at the company, it would seem very possible that shareholders would dismiss him and Perlmutter as two 81-year-olds driven by Perlmutter’s quest for revenge.
But with Rasulo on board, they’ve added a respected longtime Disney executive. Rasulo had largely disappeared from the public eye, serving on various boards including iHeartMedia and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. In a Dec. 14 statement announcing his alliance with Peltz and Perlmutter, Rasulo said, “The Disney I know and love has lost its way.”
Says one Disney veteran, “Jay has credibility. He’s not some Palm Beach crank. He’s a very legitimate voice about where Disney was eight years ago. Ike is angry and eating three nights a week at Mar-a-Lago but Jay showing up on that side is a very significant event.”
Iger appears to be taking the challenge seriously, enlisting reinforcements of his own: On Jan. 3, Disney secured support from the Mason Morfit-led investment fund ValueAct Capital Management, which has agreed to back its board of director nominees as part of a strategic consulting deal. Meanwhile, shareholder and investment firm Blackwells Capital LLC may be a wild card in the mix. While a Blackwells exec stated Wednesday that Peltz should “end his peacocking,” in a nod to backing Iger, the firm also plans to nominate its own board members — Jessica Schell, Craig Hatkoff and Leah Solivan — something that holds no appeal for Disney.
The question for Disney shareholders is whether they are antsy enough at this point to take a chance on the more credible Perlmutter-backed dissidents, whose talk of love and broken hearts is at odds with their cold-blooded reputations. Peltz is an activist investor who has swooped in on a broad assortment of companies that were seen as undervalued. Perlmutter is a controversy magnet with a well-established reputation for squeezing a dollar until it begs for mercy.
Rasulo was just the sort of tough executive Perlmutter would favor: One Disney veteran describes him as effective but also as “sort of a blunt instrument” as he made tough budget cuts and sometimes referred to other executives as “children playing at business.” A Disney insider rolls his eyes at Rasulo’s claim that he is jumping into the fray out of love for the company. “If that was really his motive he wouldn’t try to engage in a fight along with Nelson frigging Peltz and Ike Perlmutter,” he says. “Ike wants retribution and Peltz wants a fast buck. They don’t give a shit about the company.”
Perlmutter’s longtime attorney, John Turitzin, bristles at that. “It’s an absurd suggestion to make,” he says. “[Perlmutter] has got, I don’t know how many billions of dollars tied up in Disney. He’s not going to [play] a revenge game with the majority of his personal wealth.” (Perlmutter became one of Disney’s largest individual shareholders when he sold Marvel to Disney for $4 billion in 2009. Turitzin says he has never sold a share.)
Perlmutter is very much a self-made man who was never a natural fit at Disney, which has always tried to front executives who present a friendly face to the public. Before Disney and the other legacy entertainment companies were engulfed in troubles, Iger was the smooth, deft embodiment of that idea. For most of that time, Perlmutter presented no face at all: Photographs of him were all but nonexistent until Donald Trump appointed him as an adviser on veterans affairs. (That led to a ProPublica investigation and an allegation from House Democrats that Perlmutter and two other Mar-a-Lago associates had illegally tried to influence government officials “to further their own personal interests.” At one point Veterans Administration officials, ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange during an event to promote suicide-prevention, were startled when Captain America turned up beside them on the podium as Spider-Man waved from the trading floor below.)
For years, Perlmutter made waves at Disney, in part because of thrift that was extreme to the point of fishing paperclips out of waste-paper baskets. And there was more. In 2012, Financial Times reported that he had driven several executives out of Disney’s consumer products division, including the chairman of the highly profitable unit, and three African American women who sought financial settlements. Another woman was moved to a different division after alleging that Perlmutter had threatened her, saying he had a bullet with her name on it. Both Disney and Perlmutter declined to comment at the time. (Perlmutter, known to carry a gun, was named in a 2018 bribery trial when former NYPD Sgt. David Villanueva testified that he had helped expedite the renewal of Perlmutter’s gun license.)
When Marvel replaced Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle in the 2010 Iron Man sequel, Perlmutter was reported to have told a Disney executive that the move saved money and no one would notice because Black people look the same. Turitzin says Perlmutter has told him that he never made that comment.
In his memoir, Iger wrote that Perlmutter had stood in the way of two of Marvel’s groundbreaking films. “I called Ike and told him to tell his team to stop putting up roadblocks and ordered that we put both Black Panther and Captain Marvel into production,” Iger wrote. At that point, Marvel’s Kevin Feige was said to be on the brink of leaving the company. Perlmutter’s attorney Turitzin says the mogul resisted Black Panther, which was the first to go into production, “not because [he was] racist but because it had never been done before” and its success wasn’t guaranteed.
In the year since Iger returned as CEO, Disney has faced numerous well-documented challenges: losses at the streamer (which Iger has pledged will be profitable in 2024), a faltering performance from animated films, a Marvel slump and more. Above all, the stock is still stalled. Major institutional shareholders are waiting to see what specific proposals the Peltz triumvirate will present in the weeks ahead, before Disney’s still-unscheduled annual meeting.
With the company’s array of problems that don’t lend themselves to quick fixes, will shareholders be drawn to Peltz’s pitch? One longtime Disney exec thinks Rasulo will make all the difference. “It’s going to be a long, cold winter at Disney and these guys are going to make the most of it,” he says. “They’re going to go for it and they’re going to get something.”
A version of this story appeared in the Jan. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
