Michael Hiltzik: Disney needs fixing, but Peltz was the wrong repairman

Now that the smoke has cleared from the most expensive proxy fight in corporate history — the $600 million battle between investor Nelson Peltz and the management of the Walt Disney Co. — we can take a breath and ask the question often heard at the end of a bad movie:

"What the hell was that all about?"

The count of shareholder votes Disney announced Wednesday after the close of its annual meeting indicates that Peltz lost his bid for two board seats, as my colleagues Meg James and Samantha Masunaga reported. All of management's board nominees were elected.

This evidently ends a C-suite battle that riveted the financial press for months. Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger can supposedly breathe a little easier, now that Peltz is out of his hair. But he shouldn't.

The company he leads is still struggling with a raft of problems and uncertainties in its core businesses — the difficulty of extracting profits from streaming services, the hangover of poor results from the pandemic and a series