Bob Chapek announced to company executives today that Geoff Morrell, Disney’s Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, is leaving the company. According to Chapek, Morrell is leaving “to pursue other opportunities.”
Morrell has had a rocky go at the company in the few months he was there (he was appointed in December 2021) – from accidentally leaking the opening date for a new Walt Disney World attraction to the bungled response to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. In his place, newly hired Executive Vice President of Communications Kristina Schake will now lead the comms team.
A former ABC correspondent who moves into the political sphere (he was the Pentagon’s press secretary during the Iraq War) and eventually back to the private sector when in 2011 he served as vice-president and the company’s head of U.S. communications for BP, in part to massage the messaging around the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the fall of 2010, in which 210 million gallons of oil were discharged into the Gulf of Mexico. In 2020 Morrell was appointed Executive Vice President of Communications and Advocacy for BP.
In late 2021, Morrell joined Disney after the mercurial Zenia B. Mucha, former head of communications for the company, left with former CEO Bob Iger. As the New York Times noted, Morrell’s position was a consolidated one. “The position will combine several global functions — communications, public policy, government relations, corporate social responsibility and environmental issues — that previously had been distributed between Disney departments,” the New York Times wrote. Morrell moved from London to Los Angeles for the gig, serving under new CEO Bob Chapek, who had taken over for the revered Iger.
Among other things, Morrell was jeered by the fan community for sharing a photo on Twitter of himself inside the show building for the new Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind rollercoaster at EPCOT, accidentally revealing the opening date for the attraction before an official announcement (Memorial Day weekend) and tagging an EPCOT joke account instead of the actual Twitter handle. Later, actual outrage would emerge over the company’s handling of its response to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a problematic and harmful attack on the LGBTQ+ community that soon devolved into a PR nightmare, with orchestrated employee walkouts and various business units publicly expressing their disapproval.
While the company is clearly under a huge amount of scrutiny, this could be a response to try and make good.