Is Disney’s 100-yr-anniversary Super Bowl ad enough to rehabilitate the woke mouse?

Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger didn’t wait for the Super Bowl to share his company’s big game spot that reiterated an apparent mea culpa on wandering wayward down the path to woke.

Following a lasting trend of pushing progressivism that resulted in major flops and financial woes for the family entertainment company throughout 2022, a course correction may indeed be coming for Disney. Sunday morning, Iger took to social media to pre-release its Super Bowl LVII promotional advertisement that focused on celebrating the 100 years of Disney.

“Today I want to share this video, which celebrates the @WaltDisneyCo’s 100 year milestone,” he wrote of the spot that featured iconic moments from an array of films and the connections fans have made with the content. “We are enormously grateful to our storytellers, our cast members and our fans. Thank you and enjoy. #Disney100.”

Stretching from “Steamboat Willie” to “Avatar: The Way of Water,” clips of dressed-up fans interspersed with movie moments were broken up with copy that read, “For 100 years our passion has been storytelling — From one generation to the next the greatest stories live forever — You made this dream come true.”

Viewed more than one million times at the time of this posting, the roughly minute-and-a-half-long spot posted by Iger had plenty of positive reactions from users who commented with lines like “Magical!” “Wonderful!” and “Well done, Bob.”

The CEO’s caption harkened back to his announcement last week that Disney would be laying off 7,000 employees as part of their goal to get back on track. As previously reported, Iger had said on an earnings call, “Our new structure is aimed at returning greater authority to our creative leaders and making them accountable for how their content performs financially. Our former structure severed that link and must be restored. Moving forward, our creative teams will determine what content we’re making, how it is distributed and monetized, and how it gets marketed.”

The move comes after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) worked with the state legislature to take away Disney’s control of the Reedy Creek Improvement District that essentially established their own independent government in Central Florida as well as an attempt by billionaire investor Nelson Peltz, who owns an approximately 0.5 percent stake with around 9.4 million shares in Disney, valued around $900 million, to acquire a seat on the board and get a say in how the company is operating.

“We wish the very best to Bob, this management team and the board,” Peltz said to CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Thursday. “We will be watching. We will be rooting.”

Iger supposedly will step away from Disney in two years, which leaves ample time to see if the course gets appropriately corrected.

Kevin Haggerty

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