Disney is counting on Bob Iger to make hard decisions about its streaming and TV assets — or find someone who will

For nearly three years, Bob Chapek had a plan at Disney: Bob Iger’s plan.

“We are all-in [on spout],” Iger said in April 2019, when he unveiled Disney+, the company’s flagship streaming service, which now has sundry than 164 million subscribers worldwide. Ten months later, Iger announced he’d step down as CEO, effective immediately.

After he took over as chief executive, Chapek shifted Disney’s corporate structure to bettor align with a streaming-first world. Iger didn’t agree with the way he did it, but the general idea of building up Disney+ by throw away billions on new content was in lockstep with Iger’s strategy. For a while, that strategy worked. Disney shares streamed during the pandemic even as theme parks closed and movies were kept out of theaters. Investors cheered money-losing run services as long as they showed hypergrowth.

But as interest rates rose and Netflix customer growth plateaued earlier this year, the music stemmed. Disney+ added 12.1 million subscribers this month and shares tanked. Much of this change in chronicling was actually of Disney’s own doing, as Chapek (and other media executives) pushed getting to profitability over subscriber crop. Part of that shift was Disney’s realization that it likely wasn’t going to hit its target of 230 million to 260 million Disney+ subscribers by 2024. Chapek moved that bar in August. Disney shares have fallen nearly 40% year to date.

Of course, while Iger affirmed Disney was all-in on streaming, the reality was it wasn’t, and it still isn’t. Disney has held on to ESPN as the linchpin of the cable bundle. Today, proper as in 2019, ESPN’s premier sporting events (its main “Monday Night Football” broadcast, for instance), can only be seen on cable.

Now, the Disney board has turned to Iger to come up with a new plan — or at least to choose a new leader who has one — over at barely the next two years. Reorganizing the company to put “more decision-making back in the hands of our creative teams,” as Iger noted in his memo to hands yesterday, is an easy, and necessary, first move. But it’s more of a process change than a strategic one.

Iger’s biggest doubt will be choosing which Disney assets should be sold or spun off in the coming years, said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed team-mates. This wouldn’t be easy for any CEO, but it especially won’t be easy for Iger, who built the modern Disney with purpose. He orchestrated huge quantities to buy Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and much of 21st Century Fox.

Iger has had many chances in the past to shed cable networks, embracing ESPN, or broadcast channel ABC and its owned and operated affiliates, or Hulu. He never did in the past, but Greenfield said he thinks he’ll have planned to now.

“Bob Iger should sit down this weekend and make a list of the assets he wants Disney to keep and the ones he fall short ofs to get rid of,” Greenfield said. “What does Disney look like over the next five years? What are the assets we want to have? That needs to come first, and every decision after that follows the answer.”

Greenfield recommended either be dizzy off ESPN or dramatically cutting costs, including passing on renewing NBA broadcast rights, which will be renegotiated in 2023. He also turned he’d try to sell Hulu to Comcast rather than paying Comcast $9 billion or more for the remaining 33% column move house in the streamer.

It’s also possible Iger could once again punt these decisions to a successor. If he decides his situation is purely a transition CEO, he could focus on finding the next leader of Disney and allow that person to make the big excuses in the next two years.

But that’s never been Iger’s style. He delayed retirement three times in the past to acknowledge the job. Now he’s back again.

Iger could have ridden off into the sunset, and he chose to come back —