Bob Iger has spent the last two decades leading The Walt Disney Company, and in an exit interview with the Financial Times in 2024, he said the thing he was proudest of was fixing Disney Animation — not the massive corporate acquisitions he orchestrated.

This choice of legacy is worth understanding. Iger was the CEO who bought Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm — deals that together changed the entire global entertainment business. Any CEO could have pointed to those purchases and called it a day. Instead, Iger said his real accomplishment was turning around a single studio division that was struggling when he arrived.

When Iger took over as CEO, Disney Animation was making films that audiences and critics didn't love. The studio was not making much money, and it had lost its creative edge. Everything changed after Disney bought Pixar in 2006. Pixar's leaders, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, took leadership roles at the older Disney animation studio. From that point forward, Disney Animation produced major hits: Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and Frozen — a film that became one of the highest-grossing animated movies ever made.

Why does it matter that Iger focused on this one studio and not on his acquisition strategy or financial performance? Because animation is not just about making movies. Animation is the foundation for everything else Disney does. When Disney creates an animated character that audiences love, that character can appear in theme parks, become a toy, inspire merchandise, and start a franchise that lasts for decades. A weak animation studio means weak profits across all of those other businesses. Fixing animation meant fixing the entire company's future.

The moment Iger made this statement is worth considering. He returned to the CEO job in late 2022, replacing his hand-picked successor Bob Chapek, who had been removed from the role. During Chapek's time as CEO, Disney had chased streaming subscribers — borrowing the strategy of pumping out huge amounts of content to attract and keep customers streaming. That approach lost money and created pressure from investors. By choosing to emphasize animation quality in his exit interview, Iger was making a point about what he believes Disney should actually be — a company that survives and wins through original ideas and creative quality, not by flooding streaming services with content and hoping some of it sticks.

For people who follow media companies and streaming, there is a real lesson here. Over the past five years, most streaming services have competed on sheer volume — lots and lots of shows and movies, hoping viewers will find something they like. Disney's own experience during the Chapek era showed that this approach can fail. When Iger came back, he shifted the company's thinking. His message in this interview reinforces that shift: quality and creativity matter more than quantity.

The honest test of whether this worked will come in the next few years, as Disney releases new animated films. Those movies will tell us whether the animation studio Iger leaves behind is genuinely in better creative shape than when he found it.