5 Times Disney Lost Battles With Its Biggest Stars In The Past 5 Years

Jimmy Kimmel is only the latest in a line of celebrities who have had a disagreement with Disney (Randy Holmes/ABC via Getty Images)

ABC via Getty Images

Disney’s decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel following his controversial comments about the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk have been seen as a product of the current political climate in the United States. However, in fact, it is merely the latest in a string of questionable decisions over the past five years which have cast a dark spell on the company.

1. Jimmy Kimmel

Disney’s ABC network abruptly pulled the long-running late-night Jimmy Kimmel Live! show off the air on Wednesday after the comedian suggested in his monologue that Tyler Robinson, the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk, was aligned with President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

It caused FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to threaten affiliate broadcast licenses if they did not “take action” against the talk show host. In turn, that led to affiliate owners Nexstar and Sinclair saying they would preempt the show, which spurred ABC to suspend Kimmel “indefinitely.”

That decision was followed by an outpouring of support for the star. Last week hundreds protested outside Disney’s headquarters in Burbank, California and today an open letter backing Kimmel was signed by 400 Hollywood heavyweights. They included Meryl Streep, Jennifer Aniston and Pedro Pascal who stars in Disney’s upcoming Star Wars epic The Mandalorian and Grogu which unveiled its debut trailer today.

Disney’s Marvel Studios superhero star Tatiana Maslany suggested that Kimmel supporters should vote with their feet and cancel their Disney+ streaming subscriptions.

Even the Mouse’s former chief executive Michael Eisner weighed in and posted on X that “the ‘suspending indefinitely’ of Jimmy Kimmel immediately after the Chairman of the FCC’s aggressive yet hollow threatening of the Disney Company is yet another example of out-of-control intimidation. Maybe the Constitution should have said, ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, except in one’s political or financial self-interest.’”

It showed how seriously the matter is as Eisner is a famously close to Disney’s current boss Bob Iger. Eisner is also one of the company’s biggest stockholders and its price has taken a hit since the scandal erupted. It is currently down around 3.7% from its high on Wednesday and at a market capitalization of $202.5 billion that represents a loss of around $7.4 billion in stockholder value. “It’s going to go down a lot further if they cancel his show. Disney does not want to be the ones that broke America,” said another Marvel actor Mark Ruffalo on Threads.

The scandal has already cost Disney dearly and it is widely expected that it will have to do a U-Turn to stop the disenchantment from continuing. If so, it would make it the fifth time in as many years that the Mouse has had to capitulate to pressure from its biggest stars.

2. Scarlett Johansson

Disney’s first major movie after the pandemic was superhero spy story Black Widow in 2021. With many theaters still shuttered, Disney took the controversial decision of releasing it simultaneously on Disney+ where subscribers could access it for a month by paying $29.99.

The National Association of Theatre Owners blasted the decision and blamed it for a 67% fall in box office receipts in the movie’s second weekend, making it Marvel’s worst performer in that period. It also infuriated Johansson whose contract gave her a cut of the theater takings which were dented by the simultaneous streaming release. It led to her suing Disney with sources telling The Wall Street Journal that she had lost more than $50 million because of Disney’s release strategy.

Disney didn’t take the lawsuit lying down and instead blasted Johansson for her alleged “callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the COVID-19 pandemic”. It set the scene for an explosive legal battle but it was not to be as the case was settled with Johansson’s payout reportedly eclipsing $40 million.

3. Gina Carano

Despite being in the midst of a global pandemic, Disney was on the offensive in 2021 and Star Wars actress Gina Carano felt the full force of it. She was axed from The Mandalorian streaming show over social media posts that Disney claimed were “abhorrent and unacceptable” for “denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities”.

Carano disagreed with the reason for her firing and sued Disney for wrongful termination three years later with backing from Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X. “The truth is I was being hunted down from everything I posted to every post I liked because I was not in line with the acceptable narrative of the time,” she wrote on X when her lawsuit was announced in 2024.

Again, Disney reached a settlement and when it was announced in August, the company released a gushing statement saying that Carano “was always well respected by her directors, co-stars, and staff, and she worked hard to perfect her craft while treating her colleagues with kindness and respect. With this lawsuit concluded, we look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms Carano in the near future.” Capitulation doesn’t come much clearer than that.

4. Victoria Alonso

One of the linchpins of Marvel’s success on the silver screen was its president of physical and post-production, visual effects and animation production, Victoria Alonso. She started at the studio in 2006, two years before its debut picture Iron Man which kicked off the highest-grossing film franchise in history. Fast forward 17 years and the shine had come off Marvel’s crown.

In February 2023 it released Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a movie derided for having a villain which looked like a character from 2003 children’s film Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. This was blamed on over-worked visual effects staff who had to handle Marvel’s massive pipeline of streaming shows which ballooned during the pandemic when audiences were locked down indoors.

One month after Quantumania was released, Marvel unexpectedly fired Alonso and some saw her as a scapegoat for the studio’s struggles, especially given the fierce criticism of Quantumania’s VFX. However, Alonso was reportedly actually fired for promoting the historical drama she produced, Argentina, 1985.

We will never know for sure because in April 2023 Alonso and Marvel reached a settlement which reportedly had a multi-million Dollar value. Nevertheless, it didn’t quell the disenchantment as Marvel’s VFX crews voted to unionize in September 2023 so at least some good came out of this sorry story.

5. Tatiana Maslany / Sean Gunn

In 2023 the opprobriation came right from the top of Disney. Hollywood was gripped by strikes for more than six months after the Writers Guild of America (WGA) downed their tools in May. Just over two months later they were followed by the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). It marked the first time that both parties had been on strike since 1960 and money was the driving force behind it.

One of their common concerns was residuals – royalties paid to actors and writers for reruns of the films and television shows they work on as well as other airings after the initial release. The basic remuneration structure was developed in the aftermath of the 1960 strike and it has since been applied to successive forms of media.

Actors and writers are typically paid each time a show runs on network or cable television and they also receive residuals when someone buys a Blu-ray disc or DVD just as they did when VHS tapes were sold. However, the advent of streaming took the sparkle off this structure as subscribers usually pay a monthly or annual fee and get access to a studio’s entire library rather than paying to watch each production. This led to a crash in the residuals which set the stage for the strikes.

Shortly before SAG-AFTRA joined the strike Iger appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box show and said that the union’s move would have a “very, very damaging effect on the whole business.”

He continued to say that “it’s very disturbing to me. We’ve talked about disruptive forces on this business and all the challenges we’re facing, the recovery from COVID which is ongoing, it’s not completely back. This is the worst time in the world to add to that disruption.” In a damning attack on his biggest stars he added that “there’s a level of expectation that they have, that is just not realistic.” It lit the blue touchpaper.

“I think when Bob Iger talks about, ‘What a shame it is,’ he needs to remember that in the 1980s, CEOs like him made 30 times more than what the lowest worker was making,” said Marvel actor Sean Gunn from the picket line. “Maybe you should take a look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, why is that? And not only why is that, is it okay? Is it morally okay? Is it ethically okay that you make much more than your lowest worker?”

His concerns were echoed by Maslany who described Iger as being “completely out of touch. He’s completely out of touch with the workers who make his shows happen, who make people watch these shows, who bring viewers to him and him money…Having worked on a Disney show, I know where people fall through the cracks and where people are taken advantage of, and it’s outrageous the amount of wealth that is not shared with the people who actually make the show. That’s crew, cast, writers.”

Even the combined might of Hollywood’s biggest studios couldn’t win this battle. The resolution to the strikes in fall 2023 piled on the pain as the studios agreed on a formula to pay workers a share of the streaming spoils as part of an increased pay package. It added to the cost of making content which was already colossal.

Nevertheless, Disney had a trick up its sleeve as it is increasingly making pictures in the United Kingdom which offers studios a reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the costs they incur in the country. As this author recently reported, in the past 15 years alone, Disney has pocketed $2.2 billion from the U.K. government and with so many legal settlements to pay it’s perhaps no surprise that the country has become such an appealing location for Disney.