Disney doesn't hire Michael Eisner

Michael Eisner changed everything. When he became CEO of Disney in 1984, he transformed the company from another family-oriented film studio to the enormous corporate media behemoth that it is today. It is due to Eisner that the studio went through its renaissance in the 1990's, and expanded its theme parks and television presence. Eisner's successor, Bob Iger, brought the company to even further heights, bringing many companies and franchises under the Mouse's belt, and launching many successful film franchises, to the delight-- and ire-- of audiences.
But let's say that none of that happened. Let's say Disney doesn't hire Eisner and make him CEO. Would Disney have ever recovered from the slump in suffered in the 70's and 80's? Would there have been a Disney Renaissance? A Disney Channel? Would the Disney parks have expanded? Would Radio Disney have been a thing (Fun fact: Walt Disney himself coined the concept of the 'Disney Pop Star' when he launched the career of Annette Funicello to compete with Ricky Nelson in the 50's)? What would become of Marvel and Star Wars if Disney didn't buy them? What about Fox? Would Disney itself have been bought by a larger company? It seems that without Eisner's involvement in the Walt Disney Company, the entertainment industry would turn out to be much, much different.
 
Eisner's predecessor Ron W. Miller already intended to expand Disney to the mature/non family friendly film market when he founded Touchstone Pictures next year. So Disney still expands to the mature film market and still produces movies intended for the adult/mature audience. What does change is without Eisner, Disney does not massively expand it's operations it did in the 80s to become a major Hollywood studio in the likes of Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox. Disney's television will still most likely be marketed towards family friendly audiences and the Disney channel which was founded before the Eisner era will most likely be used to show Disney's archival output. Disney also does not expand to the publishing, video game business, music industry, and online business. Disney's record business would be used primarily for soundtrack releases rather than producing pop songs under the Hollywood records label. Disney might have also closed down it's animated feature film business (this almost happened OTL) or scale it down due to unpopular films or box office bombs. Therefore, there is no Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Fox purchases. Pixar would have most likely continue being a CGI company producing TV commercials (Disney approached Pixar to produce a CGI feature film which became Toy Story) or most likely becomes like Big Idea and Blue Sky and gets purchased by another studio.

Now you want to know another studio that was declining during the 80s? MGM/United Artists. MGM and United Artists were two major studios during the golden age of Hollywood, which merged in 1982. Since then both MGM and United Artists suffered a plague of problems that shrunk both studios... literally. Disney's rise in the 80s under Eisner knocked MGM/United Artists out of the major studio league and since then those studios had continued to decline to the point where it is considered a mini major in the likes of Lionsgate today. If Disney did not grow under Eisner, MGM/United Artists would still likely keep their place as a major studio.

I think the major studios today would be :

Warner Bros
20th Century Fox
Columbia Pictures
Universal Pictures
Paramount Pictures
MGM/United Artists

I think modern Disney today would be like Dreamworks, an important film studio but not exactly considered a major.
 
Eisner's predecessor Ron W. Miller already intended to expand Disney to the mature/non family friendly film market when he founded Touchstone Pictures next year. So Disney still expands to the mature film market and still produces movies intended for the adult/mature audience. What does change is without Eisner, Disney does not massively expand it's operations it did in the 80s to become a major Hollywood studio in the likes of Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox. Disney's television will still most likely be marketed towards family friendly audiences and the Disney channel which was founded before the Eisner era will most likely be used to show Disney's archival output. Disney also does not expand to the publishing, video game business, music industry, and online business. Disney's record business would be used primarily for soundtrack releases rather than producing pop songs under the Hollywood records label. Disney might have also closed down it's animated feature film business (this almost happened OTL) or scale it down due to unpopular films or box office bombs. Therefore, there is no Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Fox purchases. Pixar would have most likely continue being a CGI company producing TV commercials (Disney approached Pixar to produce a CGI feature film which became Toy Story) or most likely becomes like Big Idea and Blue Sky and gets purchased by another studio.

Now you want to know another studio that was declining during the 80s? MGM/United Artists. MGM and United Artists were two major studios during the golden age of Hollywood, which merged in 1982. Since then both MGM and United Artists suffered a plague of problems that shrunk both studios... literally. Disney's rise in the 80s under Eisner knocked MGM/United Artists out of the major studio league and since then those studios had continued to decline to the point where it is considered a mini major in the likes of Lionsgate today. If Disney did not grow under Eisner, MGM/United Artists would still likely keep their place as a major studio.

I think the major studios today would be :

Warner Bros
20th Century Fox
Columbia Pictures
Universal Pictures
Paramount Pictures
MGM/United Artists

I think modern Disney today would be like Dreamworks, an important film studio but not exactly considered a major.
It is important to consider who exactly replaces Eisner since I doubt the execs would tolerate Miller's shenanigans for any longer. You could still go for Frank wells as president, but what about the role of CEO? Katzenberg? Of course, they could've just had Wells take the role as both President and CEO much like his predecessors, but I digress. As for MGM/UA, Disney really had nothing to do with their fall. A series of bad decisions and box office bombs did, with the Turner buyout and later division as the final nail in the coffin. So unless you change that series of events as well, They'll probably go down not unlike that of RKO in the 50s. As for Pixar, without a hit like Toy Story they probably end up bankrupt since around the time it was pitched, Pixar was going through financial troubles and without some miracle, they probably end up as a dead and forgotten animation studio only known for shorts and commercials.
 
I'll give a lazy man's summary of Eisener at Disney: Eisener was half good, half bad. And had he been stopped in time, he would have been all good and very well remembered. He saved Disney, turned it around, and laid the ground work for success which still has blossomed today. Given time, he also killed the very Disney Renaissance he created, made a series of serious blunders, made blunders based on throwing Disney money at making a Disney-version of things that Disney was not involved with in order to carry out a petty vendetta against whomever he felt like (California Adventure, Animal Kingdom because Busch Gardens did well, DisneyQuest Arcades because Sega and Jeffrey Katzenberg team up, etc), and the disaster that was Euro Disney was a money sink responsible for every problem the company had. Why didn't the Disney Renaissance continue? Euro Disney. Why did they make a bunch of underwhelming straight-to-video sequels in the 2000s? Euro Disney. Why didn't the parks expand / add attraction XYZ? Euro Disney. Michael Eisener was the hero that lived long enough to see himself become the villain. His tenure also demonstrates, based on those mistakes, he didn't understand Disney as well as his earlier successes would have indicated. He certainly didn't understand its market and marketability, or how to expand the brand into new areas.

And that is perfectly summarized in Eisner's great folly of Euro Disney. It was an unnecessary theme park in an area where the people did not want it, and where Disney were likewise totally ignorant of the consumer base and therefore did not appeal to them on top of that initial hostility. It was created from an excess of ego using a honeypot of company money and thinking the brand would steamroll everything. Its failure was only reversed after decades of wasted money and debt, and only because Disney needed to pay off an albatross it should have avoided in the first place. And its investment, creation, existence and failure lead to a neglect of existing areas of the company, and an inability to work on / improve / expand those areas of Disney. So new failures hurt old successes or potential new-but-tried-and-true successes. Or those new failures Eisner oversaw meant new opportunities that could be successful became more risky, because a failure would hit the company even harder.
 
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