The company is also getting rid of its Reimagine Tomorrow initiative, which was previously used to highlight stories and other projects from underrepresented communities. Conservatives, including right-wing organization America First Legal, were predictably pissed off when the initiative was announced. Last February, AFL even went so far as to file a federal civil rights complaint against Disney for “violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by engaging in illegal race, sex, and national origin discrimination.” The organization’s reasoning was exactly what you might expect—in its view, Disney was “intentionally discriminating against white American men, Christians, and Jews simply because of their race, sex, religion, and citizenship”—but it seems to have made an impact. The Reimagine Tomorrow website was taken down in December and has since been replaced by a vaguer landing page proclaiming, “At Disney, we want everyone to belong and thrive.”
While it wasn’t included in Coleman’s note, Axios‘ sources have also suggested that the company is planning on updating the language of the content advisories that run before certain older films like Peter Pan and Dumbo on Disney+. Currently, the advisories note that the films include “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of peoples or cultures” and specify that “these stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.” In the future, those notices will be relegated to the “Details” tab on the film’s landing page and, per the outlet, will simply read, “This program is presented as originally created and may contain stereotypes or negative depictions.”
This is all happening under the reign of CEO Bob Iger, who has consistently advocated for the company to move away from what he considers politics. “Our primary mission needs to be to entertain, and then through our entertainment to continue to have a positive impact on the world,” he said in a 2023 shareholders meeting. “I’m very serious about that. It should not be agenda-driven, it should be entertainment-driven.”
