Category: Entertainment

Kristina Schake will end her four-year run as Disney‘s chief communications officer next month as Bob Iger wraps his tenure as CEO.

Schake’s departure from the role of the Mouse House’s top communications strategist is not a surprise given the C-suite transformation under way at Disney. Earlier this month, Josh D’Amaro, a veteran of Disney’s parks and experiences unit, was elevated to the CEO, which will formally take effect on March 18 at Disney’s annual shareholders meeting. Dana Walden, at present co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, will be elevated to president and chief creative officer at the same time.

Schake, whose background is in politics and public service, came to Disney in June 2022 amid the turmoil of Bob Chapek’s two and a half years as CEO, in between Iger’s first and second stints in the job. Her predecessor, Geoff Morrell, was unpopular internally and connected to several gaffes that didn’t help Chapek’s rocky time at the helm. Schake kept a low profile but was respected internally for the depth of her experience and for establishing better coordination among the company’s many communications executives.

When Iger hastily returned to the CEO post in November 2022, there was speculation that he would make a change at the top of Disney’s communications hierarchy. But Schake won his trust.

“Kristina is an accomplished and respected communications leader, and Disney has been fortunate to have her expertise and insight during a dynamic period that has demanded strategic clarity and judgment,” Iger said. “Kristina is a skilled strategist, a trusted advisor, and an admired leader whose positive impact on Disney will be lasting. She strengthened how the company aligns communications with business and strategic priorities, ensuring critical stakeholder audiences are engaged with discipline and purpose. I am grateful for her partnership and friendship, her counsel, and her innumerable contributions.”

Schake, who was also senior executive VP, joined Disney after working for the Biden administration as a key communications strategist related to COVID-19 pandemic issues as vaccines and other preventative measures were rolled out. Earlier, she worked as a top aide to first lady Michelle Obama during the Obama administration. She also served as deputy communications director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And she is a co-founder of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which fought against California’s same-sex marriage ban in the years before the 2015 Supreme Court decision established the legality of such marriages nationwide.

Schake’s employment contract with Disney was extended last October through June 2027. There’s no word yet on a successor.

“I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to serve the Walt Disney Company during such a pivotal chapter in its history,” Schake said. “The company I joined in 2022 was in a vastly different place from where it is today, both reputationally and from a business perspective, and I am proud of the work our worldwide communications team has done to support Bob as he has put Disney on a steady course for growth for the next generation of leaders. With that mission now successfully completed, I’m looking forward to my next challenge. Working alongside Bob, his management team, and so many exceptional communications professionals has been a privilege I will carry with me forever, and I leave with tremendous respect for this institution and great confidence in Disney’s future under Josh D’Amaro and Dana Walden.”

Here are the full memos sent Tuesday by Iger and Schake to Disney staffers:

Dear Fellow Employees and Cast Members,

I’m writing to share that Kristina Schake, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Communications Officer, will be departing The Walt Disney Company after March 18, coinciding with the end of my tenure as Chief Executive Officer.

Since joining Disney in 2022, Kristina has been an accomplished and respected leader and trusted advisor throughout a period of significant change for our company and our industry. Disney has been fortunate to have her expertise and wisdom during the most consequential moments over the past four years.

Beyond her strategic expertise, Kristina has built and strengthened Disney’s outstanding global communications function into the world-class organization it is today, positioning it as a critical partner to our businesses and leaders. I am personally grateful for Kristina’s partnership and friendship, and for the lasting impact she has made at Disney. Please join me in thanking her for her leadership and wishing her the very best in her next chapter. We will share more information about future communications leadership in due course.

Sincerely,

Bob

Team,

I wanted to write to you directly and simply say thank you. Working alongside this outstanding communications team has been one of the great privileges of my career.

The past four years have been among the most consequential in our company’s history, and I could not be more proud of how you showed up for every moment. You brought clarity, creativity, and thoughtful strategy to the work, helping to communicate and advance Bob’s strategic priorities in ways that employees, investors, reporters, and consumers could understand and believe in.

As Disney begins its next chapter, the company is fortunate to have outstanding leaders in Josh and Dana guiding the way. I am excited to see the stories you will help tell and the impact you will continue to have as that chapter unfolds. This team’s talent, care, and creativity are exactly what this moment calls for, and I know you will shape what comes next in remarkable ways.

With gratitude,

Kristina

As the FCC explores raising station cap limits and station groups aim for more mega-mergers — including Nexstar‘s proposed acquisition of Tegna — a new report commissioned by DirecTV shows that markets with a Big Four duopoly, triopoly or even quadropoly have been left with fewer newsrooms and less diversity of voices.

“Recent history shows that when broadcasters acquire a second, third, or fourth station in a local market, they consolidate news operations, leaving one newsroom where there had been two, three, or four, thus decreasing the quality of local news,” wrote DirecTV attorneys Michael Nilsson and Annick M. Banoun in a letter sent today to the FCC. “This is not a speculative claim. In fact, in the context of the proposed Nexstar-Tegna transaction, we’ve filed evidence demonstrating that Nexstar, for example, has done this with every duopoly or triopoly it possesses.”

DirecTV looked at every Nielsen DMA (designated market area) with Big Four affiliates operated under the same management team (excluding ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox O&Os), and found that there are 98 duopolies, 15 triopolies and three quadropolies. (And DirecTV didn’t even include combos with non-Big Four affiliates like The CW or My Network TV — even though a great number of Nexstar stations are affiliated with The CW, which the company owns. And DirecTV didn’t include stations that are considered “sidecar operations,” where companies like Nexstar work with stations that are owned by other entities. That would have made the marked decrease in local news even more telling.)

And as one might expect, according to DirecTV, those co-managed stations consolidate their online news to a single site, utilize one news director across all stations and share journalists and anchors across those stations — instead of operating them as distinct news operations.

“By our calculations, in the vast majority of markets in which any broadcaster holds a duopoly, triopoly, or quadropoly today, they have consolidated news operations,” the DirecTV filing said. “In the majority of duopolies, triopolies, and quadropolies, the co-owned stations offered essentially the same local news.”

To create its study, DirecTV first identified Big Four affiliate duopolies, triopolies and quadropolies, across station groups including Nexstar, Sinclair, Scripps, Hearst, Lilly, Gray, Tegna and more. It looked at station websites to see if more than one station was referenced, if there was a shared news director and if there was shared news talent. Among all broadcast duopolies and beyond, 90.5% of news sites were shared, 98.2% of news directors were shared and 97.3% of news talent was shared.

“The evidence conclusively demonstrates that broadcaster consolidation reduces competition, output, and quality in local news. Accordingly, we urge the Commission to reject broadcasters’ proposals that would create more duopolies, triopolies, and quadropolies and decrease local news content,” Nilsson and Banoun wrote.

Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey came together for a one-of-a-kind town hall conversation hosted by Variety and CNN. The program, which aired Feb. 21 on CNN, is now available to stream on Variety‘s YouTube channel, along with bonus footage.

“A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey,” which was filmed before a live audience of University of Texas at Austin’s students, marked a reunion for Chalamet and McConaughey, who played son and father in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi epic “Interstellar.”

In the 90-minute conversation, the actors discussed their memories from “Interstellar,” Chalamet’s role in “Marty Supreme,” their approaches to acting and more. Chalamet and McConaughey also answered questions from audience members throughout the evening.

“Man, that’s remains my favorite project I’ve ever been in,” Chalamet told McConaughey about “Interstellar.” “I think it’s your most fantastic role. I know you were coming off ‘Dallas Buyers Club,’ but that movie, to me, was the origin point in seeing how you carried yourself on set, how seriously you and Christopher Nolan took the work. It gave me a license. Coming out of high school, it’s hard to take yourself super seriously. You can feel like you’re wasting time or stuck-up or something. And I remember you had a yoga mat, and you’d be working out and sleeping on set. It was all very strange to me. But it was super inspiring. I just can’t thank you enough for being warm to me at that time, when you had no reason to be warm to me. Christopher as well. It just changed my life, man.”

McConaughey responded, “Thanks for that, man. You were pretty easy to be warm to. I remember you had what I felt like was a feverish curiosity at that time. You were figuring some stuff out, but it seemed obvious to me that no matter what you were dealing with, you were going to make your way. And I believe you were in some sort of limbo. You were choosing — something about music, and somebody was putting pressure about, ‘Maybe go this way,’ and you wanted to go this way.”

At one point, Chalamet shared new details about “Dune: Part Three,” which opens in theaters this December. He teased that the final film in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi trilogy is the “eeriest one” and a “big swing.”

Chalamet later added, “I didn’t want to be complacent about a single moment. Everything was sacred, and it was my last time doing a ‘Dune’ film, so I really wanted to treat it as sacred. Because people can get complacent, but I was more intense on the third one. It felt like that was the natural momentum, so I wanted to push against that as hard as I could.”

Watch “A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey” below.