‘We all failed’: Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner on Hollywood, video games and the big question of IP

Hollywood’s biggest blind spot has never been storytelling — it’s been figuring out how to extend valuable intellectual property into new formats and technologies, former Walt Disney Company CEO Michael Eisner said Thursday, citing his own industry’s repeated stumbles in gaming as proof.

“We all failed,” Eisner said. “We ended up licensing. That’s how we succeeded.”

Speaking at the Paley Center for Media’s discussion “Sports in the Gaming Era,” Eisner used gaming as his central example of a pattern that has played out across Hollywood for decades: media companies possess enormously valuable IP, yet consistently misjudge how — or whether — to extend it into unfamiliar formats.

Eisner traced the pattern back to the industry’s earliest attempts to enter gaming. “Warner Brothers started it all with Atari, 1983. They went under,” he said, adding that it took two more years for Nintendo’s Mario Brothers game to revive the format. (Indeed, Warner sold Atari in 1984 for a loss, and Super Mario Bros. was first released in 1985.) The problem wasn’t creative, he argued — it was technological illiteracy: gaming “was so technologically driven in the beginning, which was not the strong suit of any of us.”

Eisner also said that the industry has changed today, going from the technological limits of the past to leveraging IPs as an asset. “Now it’s story-driven,” he said. “Now it is IP-driven.”

Eisner said the same failure to adapt has shaped how studios think about licensing versus building original IP — a tension he sees as core to Hollywood’s business model, not unique to any one medium. “We all take the IP that we made and put it in a place where you can enjoy it,” he said, referring to Disney’s approach across parks, merchandise,........

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