George Lucas Backs Bob Iger in Disney Proxy War

Movies

George Lucas is throwing in with the Empire. Disney CEO Bob Iger is currently engaged in a “proxy fight” with Nelson Peltz, an investor who is trying to get Disney shareholders to vote him onto the Disney board so he can increase his influence over the company. Now, George Lucas – the largest single Disney shareholder due to his payout from the Lucasfilm sale – has weighed in on the battle, and he’s supporting Iger. In a statement released to CNBC, Lucas definitively backed Iger and urged his fellow shareholders to do the same:

“Creating magic is not for amateurs. When I sold Lucasfilm just over a decade ago, I was delighted to become a Disney shareholder because of my long-time admiration for its iconic brand and Bob Iger’s leadership. When Bob recently returned to the company during a difficult time, I was relieved. No one knows Disney better. I remain a significant shareholder because I have full faith and confidence in the power of Disney and Bob’s track record of driving long-term value. I have voted all of my shares for Disney’s 12 directors and urge other shareholders to do the same.”

Remember when Bob Iger wrote a book in which he bragged about selling George Lucas a bill of goods about how they’d respect his creative direction for Star Wars, then stabbed him in the back and did whatever he and Disney wanted as soon as the deal was done? Remember when Lucas lamented that he’d “sold Star Wars to the white slavers?” Remember when each successive Star Wars sequel made less money than the previous one, not even accounting for inflation? Remember when Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny bombed spectacularly? Remember when the Willow TV series was removed from Disney+ because memory-holing it was less costly than continuing to stream it? I don’t know what made me think of all that.

Just funnin’. I imagine this is purely a business decision for Lucas. He’s likely picking what he thinks is the lesser of two evils. It isn’t so much about Star Wars and Lucasfilm but about managing Disney and Iger’s history steering the ship. Before the company went full-on activist, Iger made a lot of money for Disney and its shareholders, and for people who’ve been invested in it for a long time, that’s probably hard to forget. When I was in high school, there was a guy who raised his hand constantly early in the year; when everyone asked him why, he said he was getting the teachers to associate him with active participation so he could eventually stop doing it, and they wouldn’t notice. That kind of thing works, and because Iger was so good at his job for so long, he’s got that branding of a successful CEO. It’s hard for longtime investors to blame him for Disney’s recent failures because they remember the good times. George Lucas got his Disney shares in 2012, the year The Avengers was released; he probably made a lot of money from some of Iger’s decisions, like buying Marvel. It’s tempting – and probably soothing – to see Disney’s current woes as a temporary blip on an otherwise stellar career. You can extrapolate that from some of the language Lucas uses, like feeling “relieved” when Iger took the reins back from Bob Chapek. That Chapek’s perceived failures were, in large part, Iger’s fault is immaterial because of the perception of Chapek as the problem and Iger as the solution, a perception Iger has years of success to use to sell the investors. Lucas likely sees throwing in with Peltz as a risk he doesn’t want to take when the guy whose watch brought them Avengers: Endgame and Avatar: The Way of Water is the alternative. It’s not good for us, but I understand why George Lucas thinks it’s good for him.