Dick Cook's ouster signals shift in direction for Disney

The message that Bob Iger just sent to Hollywood couldn't be more coldbloodedly clear. Friday's news that the Disney chief executive had ousted studio head Dick Cook -- coming less than three weeks after the company acquired Marvel Entertainment -- is a strong signal that the Disney we've known in the past is not going to be the Disney we'll be seeing in the future.

If the Marvel deal was a bold move by Iger to grab hold of the demographic that Disney has the most trouble attracting -- young men -- then Cook's abrupt departure was a sign that the studio would soon be in the hands of someone without any strong ties to Disney's storied, safe-as-milk past. After all, Cook, who began his career 38 years ago as a 21-year-old Disneyland tour operator, was the last active Disney executive who'd been at the company before the arrival of Michael Eisner, Iger's former boss. It was Eisner, of course, who was the first man to reinvent Disney, taking over the sleeping entertainment giant in 1984 and transforming it into a hugely profitable modern-day family entertainment conglomerate.

When Eisner first stepped in to run Disney, the fabled studio was so out of the Hollywood mainstream that when he drove to work on his first day as its new president, he had to call his lawyer to ask for directions. It's unlikely that Iger's new choice to run Disney will have trouble finding the studio lot. But what is likely is that the studio chief will oversee a wholesale reinvention of the Disney brand, which after a long, successful run, has begun to show its age, slowly losing much of its stranglehold on young audiences to other edgier, more vital youth culture brands, including Marvel.

I got quite a laugh reading in the media accounts of Cook's ouster that Iger might have been frustrated by the Disney veteran's personal style, which was described as genial but uncommunicative to the point of secretiveness. When it comes to playing it close to the vest, no one is more covert than Iger himself. After all, when everyone else in the world, starting with Ron Meyer, assumed that DreamWorks was doing a new distribution deal with Universal, it was Iger who was secretly negotiating a deal with Steven Spielberg last February, stealing DreamWorks right from under Universal's nose.