50 GENIUS COMPANIES
THE 2018 LIST
23ANDME
AGRIPROTEIN
AIDOC
AIRBNB
AMAZON
APEEL SCIENCES
APPLE
AWAY
BABYMIGO
BIRD
BITLAND
BRCK
BUMBLE
CAMEO
CLUE
COMMONBOND
DISNEY
DJI
DOMINO’S
DUOLINGO
EPIC GAMES
EVERLANE
FENTY BEAUTY
GOFUNDME
GW PHARMACEUTICALS
HOUSTON ASTROS
IMPOSSIBLE FOODS
INTERMEDIA LABS
LISHTOT
LOCKHEED MARTIN
MERCK
NETFLIX
NIKE
NINTENDO
OBVIOUS
OCULUS
ONA
OPORTUN
PAYTM
PELOTON
SINGAPORE AIRLINES
SLACK
SPACEX
SPOTHERO
SPOTIFY
VOLVO
WEWORK
WONDERBAG
XIAOMI
DISNEY
LEADING THE MAGIC KINGDOM INTO TOMORROWLAND
BY BELINDA LUSCOMBE
THREE OR FOUR TIMES A YEAR, DISNEY CEO AND chairman Bob Iger crosses from his office on the Burbank, Calif., lot with a couple of fellow execs to Disney Animation Studios, where rooms have been prepared for them. In each, they are pitched a movie. Sometimes the films are no more than an idea, and the room just has some art boards and a director with a 15-minute plot outline. Others are more elaborate—the room for Frozen 2 included a video from a research trip to Norway, Iceland and Finland, a “tone reel” and a wall of index cards detailing themes and emotional threads. Sounds like fun—except that each room represents a $150 million bet on what, in four or five years, audiences will pay to see.
Iger, 67, is good at picking winners. This is, after all, the man who greenlighted America’s Funniest Home Videos. On his watch, Disney has released five of the top 10 grossing global hit movies of all time, selling a cumulative $8.4 billion worth of movie tickets. And not only did he sign off on those movies, he also spearheaded the purchase of the companies that made them, which requires prophetic skills of a whole different order. Apple CEO Tim Cook says Iger operates a lot like a tech-company CEO. “Both are trying to skate to where the puck is going and not where it is. We’re making calls years in advance.”
Of course, figuring out which films to make is a fundamental skill for any media mogul. What really distinguishes Iger from rival Hollywood CEOs—and what has insulated Disney from the vast shifts in viewing patterns that have battered others—is his conviction that an already gigantic company should keep getting bigger. While competitors mostly avoided risks at this scale, Iger spent lavishly to buy Pixar ($7.4 billion), Marvel ($4 billion) and Lucasfilm ($4 billion), giving Disney a lineup of moneymaking franchises that far outdistances competitors’.
Although some critics bemoan the sequelization of Hollywood, no one doubts that Iger’s moves have paid off. Audiences, most of the time, keep buying tickets. And “sequel” doesn’t actually do justice to Iger’s achievement: with the Marvel and Star Wars films, Disney has acquired entire fictional universes that can spawn lucrative new content in all directions. A Marvel movie character can power a new Disney theme-park ride, inspire a TV series and serve as the focus of a video game, all under the Disney tent.
More remarkable, in an industry of big egos, Iger’s relatively hands-off management style has allowed Disney to swallow these companies without masticating the qualities that make them unique. Industry observers say Iger’s collaborative approach has been critical to retaining the creative talent that made the properties worth buying—and in some cases, made those deals possible. (Iger famously took a Disney-Pixar relationship that had frayed under his predecessor and persuaded Steve Jobs to let Disney buy the animation powerhouse outright.)
When TIME set out to identify the most creatively successful companies in the world, candidates ranged from brilliant upstarts to household names. But even in that elite group, the Walt Disney Co. stands out. So far in 2018, Disney has released the top three U.S. box-office hits. And Iger has topped his own bigger-is-better strategy with a $71 billion deal to buy 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets, bringing into the fold everything from Avatar to The Simpsons. Now the studio that began in the back of a real estate office by selling its first cartoon to one distributor in 1923 is poised to launch its own streaming service. By eliminating the middlemen and selling content directly to consumers, Disney will disrupt the disrupters. “I don’t think anybody else could do this but us, frankly,” says Iger.
In 2005, when Iger was named Disney’s sixth CEO, the company was in a rut. The brand felt dated, age-limited and low-quality. The previous CEO, the mercurial Michael Eisner, had some brilliant years and some not so brilliant, during the last five of which Disney stock fell by roughly a third. Iger was a veteran
