I remember the backlash against Disney very well. In 2021, when the company launched its Reimagine Tomorrow diversity initiative and pledged that 50% of recurring characters in scripted content would come from underrepresented groups, it was met with a collective sigh. Disney didn’t seem to care about the criticism. They marched headlong into the proverbial abyss.
However, the market eventually caught up to them. And the market, unlike a clever columnist or random X thread, has one thing that influences a publicly traded company more than virtually anything else: a revenue line.
Fast-forward to 2026 and Bob Iger is out at Disney. Josh D'Amaro took over as CEO in March 2026, capping a succession plan the board was quietly building for two years. Disney's 2024 10-K filing dropped "Reimagine Tomorrow" by name. And its 2025 proxy statement swapped the "Diversity & Inclusion" executive compensation metric for something called "Talent Strategy."
A February 2025 internal memo from Chief Human Resources Officer Sonia Coleman confirmed the changes were operational, not cosmetic. The "Stories Matter" content warnings on classic Disney+ films got shortened and buried. The interesting part of this story is that it was all done quietly. Disney apparently never held a press conference about any of this. They made the same retreat Walmart and McDonald's made, only they did it inside SEC filings instead of in front of cameras.
This should tell us everything we needed to know about what DEI really was for corporate America: a bargaining chip. It was a gamble rather than an honest conviction. Companies are in the business of making money. The messaging they chose to hitch their wagon to was, in their minds, linked to the belief that it would lead to major profits. When it stopped being profitable, it was time to find new messaging.
The timeline bears this out. Disney launched Reimagine Tomorrow in April 2021, which was the same time every Fortune 500 company was racing to prove its social awareness after the chaos in the summer of 2020.
Meta eliminated its DEI function in early 2025, citing the changing “legal and policy landscape." Amazon phased out inclusion-focused leadership training and cut supplier diversity programs. Target ended its Racial Equity Action and Change initiative, claiming the three-year roadmap was simply complete.
Fortune 500 DEI disclosures fell 65% in 2026, according to findings cited by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. This is strong evidence to suppose that DEI, as a corporate position, was meant to maximize profits. It had little to do with honest beliefs or convictions.
The political pressure from the Trump administration's executive orders played a role, especially for federal contractors. But the orders didn't create the retreat. They accelerated something the audience had already started. Disney's own CEO said the quiet part out loud at the 2023 DealBook Summit, when Iger told the audience that Disney's creators had "lost sight" of their primary job. "We have to entertain first," he said. "It's not about messages."
Researchers Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev reviewed nearly a thousand studies and discovered that the positive effects of diversity training rarely last more than two days. And, contrary to its purpose, anti-bias sessions can lead to resistance. The Heritage Foundation's Jonathan Butcher made a similar case about DEI programs in schools, noting that discrimination complaints hit record numbers even as DEI offices multiplied.
I'm not arguing that every company that adopted DEI language was acting in bad faith. Some leaders genuinely believed in what they were building. But the speed of the retreat tells you how many companies were making a business decision. When the market turned, when the audience walked, the commitments dried up in months.
Critics on the right spent years arguing that corporate DEI wasn’t the way to go. And critics on the left spent years arguing that it was insufficient. They were both right. The programs were too shallow to deliver real change and too conspicuous to survive a shift in consumer sentiment.
The only force powerful enough to move a company the size of Disney was the box office, the gates of their theme parks, and the subscriber count on Disney+.
A few years ago, you couldn't get Disney to flinch. Now, the new CEO is a theme-parks guy who built his career on giving people a good time, not a good lecture. The market did what the critics couldn't. It always does. And this, for me, is a victory.
Collin Jones holds a BA in Film and an MFA in prose writing. Before transitioning into marketing, he worked as an editor at Blaze Media. He is the author of the novel "Project: Sleepless Dream" and a short story collection called "The Desertianists." In his free time, he writes on "Concordant Student."
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
Don’t miss out! Subscribe to our newsletter and get our top stories every weekday morning.
