Bob Iger Claims To Care About 'Creative Community' as He Gets in Bed With OpenAI

Watching the sale of Warner Bros. turn into a bidding war between two media giants (and Comcast) feels reminiscent of the tagline for Alien vs Predator: “Whoever wins, we lose.” No matter who emerges victorious, be it the streaming giant that hates movie theaters or the billionaire-owned company that’s helping prop up the current presidential administration, people will be laid off, certain jobs will become nonexistent, and the media landscape will become smaller.

It’s already pretty damn bad. Media companies have always been obsessed with making profits over product, but that has gotten worse and worse with the emergence of terrible-looking generative AI and studios embracing it like a tax loophole. An artist’s ability to make a living in the industry has been reduced significantly, and it’s hard to imagine that things will get better anytime soon. There are bright spots, but they are few and far between.

I can say that confidently as someone who is a member of, let’s call it, the Creator Community. I’ve written and directed a few short films, directed a pilot, and work with a wonderful theater out of DUMBO. I’m an artist, trying to make it, like many others I know, who have varying levels of success. Even those I know who have “made it” have lamented how bad it’s gotten. They know that the industry is hurting, and the last thing any artist I know would want to hear is some nonsense about how Bob Iger is concerned about them.

But that’s exactly what happened. The man behind every live-action Disney remake you don’t like has decided to weigh in on the ongoing attempt to buy Warner Bros, which everyone assumed Netflix had succeeded in doing. Instead, David Ellison threw a billionaire-style hissy fit and teamed up with the President’s son-in-law and Saudi Arabia to attempt a hostile takeover. After taking a shot at Netflix potentially winning out by lamenting the effect it may have on the consumer (like he cares), Iger made an even more baffling claim: that he cared about how it would affect creators.

“Additionally, I’d look at what the impact might be on what I’ll call the creative community, but also on the ecosystem of television and films, particularly motion pictures,” Iger explained in a joint interview. “These movie theaters, which obviously run our films worldwide, operate with relatively thin margins, and they require not only volume, but they require interaction with these films and these movie companies that give them the ability to monetize successfully. That’s a very, very important global business. And I think it’s … we’ve been certainly participating in it in a very big way. We’ve got $33 billion in films in the last 20 years, and you know, we so we’re mindful of protecting the health of that business. It’s very important to what I’ll call the media media ecosystem globally.”

Do I love movie theaters and want them to keep going? Absolutely! But choking them with nothing but tentpole films that make one company billions of dollars is not how that gets done. Framing it with the mention of concern for the “creative community” is also quite rich when you’re being interviewed with Sam Altman, because you made a deal to let his terrible AI company raid the work of the “creative community” you loosely claim to care about, so you can keep feeding the YouTube machine without having to pay anyone for their work. But that’s where we’re at.

It really adds to the helplessness of it all. There’s nothing we can really do to stop this, aside from waiting for the AI bubble to burst. So, like with the current attempted merger or acquisition or coup, or whatever it is, we have to sit back as a bunch of white dudes who make far more than they’re worth, make decisions that will ruin countless lives, which they will eventually disregard as a “bump in the road” or some such nonsense while they inject their children’s blood into their epididymis or whatever rich people are doing these days.