In a wide-spanning interview with The New York Times Sunday, Disney Chairman/CEO Bob Iger downplayed comments he made during a quarterly earnings call last month about the struggles of 20th Century Fox, which reported an operational loss of $170 million in its first quarter since being acquired by Disney.
“One of the biggest issues we faced in the quarter was the performance of the Fox film business,” Iger said during the Aug. 6 call. “It was well below what it had been and well below what we thought it would be when we did the acquisition.”
Iger refuted NYT writer Maureen Dowd’s suggestion in Sunday’s story that former Fox owner Rupert Murdoch had taken advantage of him, and rejected the idea that Disney was having buyers’ remorse after it inherited films like “Dark Phoenix” that tanked at the box office.