Unauthorized Book on Bob Iger’s Disney Power Struggle Gets Release Date (Exclusive)

An upcoming and unauthorized book about Bob Iger and his tenure atop The Walt Disney Co. has Hollywood buzzing.

The book, titled The House of Mouse: Bob Iger and The War of Succession at Disney, is slated for release on Dec. 1, 2026, The Hollywood Reporter has learned, with a provocative cover design featuring a Mickey Mouse-adorned crown sitting atop a red pillow (with a conspicuous bite taken out of one of the ears).

Authored by Wall Street Journal reporter Robbie Whelan, THR hears that among the topics set to be covered will be Iger’s friendship-turned-rivalry with former Marvel chief Ike Perlmutter. Iger of course orchestrated the $4 billion Marvel deal in 2009, making Perlmutter one of the company’s largest shareholders.

They are said to have been close, with Iger providing notes on Marvel projects and griping about compensation issues to the comic book impresario (both topics expected to be addressed in the book). Ultimately, of course, the two would be at odds, with Perlmutter helping his friend Nelson Peltz lead an activist campaign against Disney and Iger, with the billionaire being shown the door from Disney in 2023.

According to the The House of Mouse’s description from publisher HarperCollins (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., for those wondering), Whelan’s book relies “on hundreds of interviews with key figures in Iger’s orbit and thousands of pages of documentary evidence, including sensitive corporate communications and internal memos that have never been reported before.”

“Whelan unspools the tale of how Iger molded Disney so tightly in his image that he became convinced that only he could run the company,” the description continues. “Iger’s reluctance to give up control led to a decade-long, Machiavellian power struggle for which Disney executives, employees, and shareholders ultimately paid dearly.”

Whelan’s book concerned Disney enough that the company is said to have hired attorney Charles Harder to push for fact-checking and details on what it contains, with speculation about who some of Whelan’s sources may be, according to Puck.

“At its heart, The House of Mouse is a deeply human story about the tension between creative human endeavors and the harsh realities of running a media business in the twenty-first century, and how one man struggled—as the monarch of any great kingdom must—to balance the needs of the many constituencies who love and depend on Mickey, Minnie, and the rest of Disney’s stable of beloved stories, characters, experiences, and products,” the HarperCollins description adds.

Disney, it turns out, is becoming ripe fodder for the publishing world. Former CEO Bob Chapek, who was Iger’s successor in 2020 only to be ousted two years later when Iger returned, has his own tell-all called Behind the Castle Walls, which will be released later this month.

“Was he really given a fair shot or was he set up to fail? What drove his ousting and Bob Iger’s return? What happened behind the scenes at Disney during COVID, and how did those decisions impact what we see today?” Chapek’s publisher says of that book.

And Iger himself is said to once again be working on another book (it would be his second after the 2019 memoir The Ride of a Lifetime), though there is no title or release date as of yet.