Rich Ross named chief of Walt Disney Studios
Rich Ross, the television executive who helped revive the moribund Disney Channel, now has to prove he can work movie magic at Walt Disney Studios.
The 47-year-old former talent department head has been, as expected, tapped by Disney Chief Executive Robert A. Iger to fill much of the studio post formerly held by Dick Cook, who was ousted last month after clashing with his boss and failing to deliver enough hits over the last year.
Iger will look to Ross to reinvigorate Disney’s flagging box-office fortunes and develop film franchises that can be sold across the entertainment giant’s lines of businesses -- including theme parks, consumer products and television -- as well as grapple with a host of technological issues that are quickly reshaping Hollywood.
By picking an executive from outside the clubby precincts of the movie business, Iger hopes Ross can shake up a studio that the Disney chief views as entrenched in the past, from the kinds of high-priced stars hired for films to the way pictures are made and marketed.
To achieve this, Ross may be borrowing liberally from the playbook he followed to turn around Disney Channel, which has eclipsed the movie studio in recent years as a hothouse for talent and ideas that could be packaged and resold across the company’s various platforms. Ross has proved himself adept at turning entertainment into a “brand” strategy -- high-profile examples are “Hannah Montana,” which launched pop star Miley Cyrus’ career, and “High School Musical,” which was created for television but quickly found life -- and revenue -- in recorded music, a big-screen blockbuster and a stage show.
Indeed, at a company that stresses team playing among its executives, Ross may be the ultimate team player.
Since his arrival at Disney Channel in 1996, Ross worked closely with other divisions of the Burbank-based company. For example, when the channel cast Cyrus as Hannah Montana in 2005, Ross ordered an internal “road show” to introduce the new program to other parts of Disney. Within six months of the show’s debut, the consumer products group was shipping Hannah Montana clothing to stores -- shaving a year off the time required for new TV-linked merchandise to reach retail outlets.
Such cross-division collaboration is a priority for Iger, and something he felt was lacking at the movie studio. Moreover, Disney Channel, under Ross’ lead, has become a model for Iger’s oft-touted “franchise” strategy, in which entertainment properties can feed other parts of the Disney empire.
A prime example is 2006’s “High School Musical” -- a chaste retelling of “Grease” and a tale of improbable high school romance. Ross revved up the Disney marketing machine, leading to the release of a soundtrack that was a top-selling CD, a sold-out 42-date concert tour in North and South America, a show at Disney’s theme parks and a slew of merchandise.
The 2007 sequel, “High School Musical 2,” became the highest-rated telecast in cable history at the time, and the third installment in 2008, “High School Musical 3: Senior Year,” raked in $250 million in worldwide box-office sales.
But despite his success in television, Ross has virtually no experience in feature films -- a more protracted process and one encumbered by big egos, longtime habits and much higher-cost structures. He must quickly reach out and calm anxieties among Disney’s movie talent, including director Steven Spielberg, producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Scott Rudin, and stars like Johnny Depp -- all of whom were close to Cook and distraught over Iger pushing him out.
Chief on Ross’ list will be figuring out how to integrate the latest planned addition to Disney’s family, Marvel Entertainment, whose library of superhero characters the studio will seek to exploit. Disney has lagged behind rival studios that have successively produced film adaptations of Marvel properties such as X-Men and Spider-Man.
Another priority for the incoming studio chief will be forging ties with Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios, which recently signed a multiyear distribution deal with Disney and expects to supply the studio with four to six movies a year.
But Ross’ greatest challenge will be to address Disney’s creative dearth. Although Disney isn’t the only studio to have suffered a bad year at the box office, the division lost $12 million in its most recent quarter -- its first loss in four years. A number of its recent movies, including the Adam Sandler family comedy “Bedtime Stories,” the costly 3-D guinea pig saga “G-Force,” and “Race to Witch Mountain,” failed to attract wide audiences.
And like all studio heads, Ross will find himself grappling with a number of sea changes in the business caused by a slump in DVD sales -- the most lucrative part of a film’s revenue stream -- and technological shifts that have changed how, when and where people watch movies.
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