by Pierre Lorenz on February 9, 2023

In 2020, Disney CEO Bob Iger actually intended to take his well-deserved retirement. However, he returned to his position at the end of 2022 after his planned successor Bob Chapek was unable to deliver the desired figures. This week, the first big public appearance of the returning Bob Iger was made and there were a lot of new announcements straight away.

The first announcement concerns Disney itself. Iger would like to get the global company on the right track financially and is cutting 7,000 jobs in order to achieve the savings target of a whopping $5.5 billion. In addition, the focus will be placed even more strongly on Disney+ in the future: The streaming service is expected to turn a profit from 2024, according to the current plan, and thus become viable for Disney.

Besides the bare figures concerning the company, there is also news about further animation projects in the next few years. Unsurprisingly, the announced sequels are all based on film franchises that have been extremely lucrative so far. Both "Zootopia 2" and "Frozen 3" are currently in production. While "Zootopia" grossed nearly 1 billion U.S. dollars in 2016 and was thus very successful as a stand-alone film, the entire "Frozen" franchise has meanwhile grossed 13.7 billion U.S. dollars.

The same applies to the third announced movie, which is being produced by Pixar. The movie in question is "Toy Story 5", which is expected to get the 14.5 billion US dollar franchise back on track after the "Lightyear" spin-off was a flop. Sadly, Iger did not yet give an exact schedule for the three sequels, which is why the release dates are still unknown.