If Disney thought 2023 was bad, then the studio better sit down for the cards 2024 has put down on the table out of the blue.
As I was saying, 2023 was a disastrous disaster for the Mouse House from flops in the animated front to Marvel’s surefire winners crashing and burning to even its once-bankable Indiana Jones not surviving the forced revival. But 2024 was supposed to change it all and after Pixar’s Inside Out 2 hit theaters, for a while, it felt like Disney has finally revered its bad luck and is on the path of victory again. But not for long.
Until Inside Out 2, Warner Bros. was continuing its streak of hogging the box office that it started with Barbie and was continuing with Dune: Part Two, which was the highest-grossing domestic earner until Joy, Anger, and Happiness blasted past its $280 million in just eight days. Disney was also enjoying success on the streaming front as the first installment in the Inside Out saga raced to the top of the most watched Disney Plus films, garnering points that surpassed Dune: Part Two’s progress over at HBO (via Flix Patrol)
But now, Disney is facing a giant controversy and no matter whether it spills over into legal troubles or ends up being a hoax, it has successfully ensured that the studio’s desperately needed moment of fame is negatively overshadowed.
Disney allegedly discriminates against “white males” and turns down black candidates for being “half black”
Disney has been the target of immense criticism for its motto to be inclusive and diverse, something that it had been diligently employing in terms of writers, directors, actors, and the style of stories being told via their shows and films. The endless jabs aimed at its “wokeness” and how it was the reason behind the studio’s latest string of losses did little to deter the House of Mouse.
But now, infamous right-wing activist James O’Keefe has released a damaging video of Senior VP of Business Affairs, Michael Giordano, who confesses to one of his “reporters” that Disney discriminates against white males when it comes to hiring writers, actors, or any other available roles at the company and how this is less of an unspoken agreement since it has been verbally stressed many times.
“Nobody else is going to tell you this, but they’re not considering any white males for the job…there’s no way we’re hiring a white male.”
His admission then proceeds to expose how Disney even turned down a black candidate since they were not black enough – “half black” – to qualify for the studio’s drive to win the inclusivity drive, which it seems to have twisted into an agenda to ace.
Of course, the whole situation is suspicious, with many voicing the possibility of all of it being fake – Giordano as Disney’s VP and his alarming words. A link to his LinkedIn page now shows an error message with a few sharing screenshots of the before and after of his now-deleted profile, but his stark absence from anywhere else on social media and the last (and perhaps only) mention of the man being a nine-year-old Deadline piece detailing how he was 20th Century Fox TV’s SVP is hard to digest. There is also the matter of Disney’s stony silence on the whole fiasco which has been spreading fast since it was posted two days ago and O’Keefe’s notorious history of selectively editing videos and recording to twist the context of conversations.
But it has already attracted trouble, legal trouble to be precise, for Disney. If any of the statements made in the video end up being true, then the studio would be guilty of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which “protects employees and job applicants from employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.”
Disney has already been warned of the violation by many conservatives, including staunch Donald Trump supporter, Mike Lee, Utah’s Senator.
For now, we have O’Keefe’s video and the running rumor that Disney has instructed Giordano to take a “leave of absence” until this particular storm ends. But again, as stated above, no matter what this controversy’s final face is, it has already replaced Disney’s success with a dangerous scandal
