It's a big and, perhaps to some, surprising departure. Cook is stepping down as chairman of Walt Disney Studios, effectively immediately. LAT posts that Cook told staff that he felt he was a square peg in a round hole. He has been with the company for 38 years, starting out as a ride operator on Disneyland's steam train and monorail. "I have been contemplating this for some time now and feel it's the right time for me to move on to new adventures," he said in a statement. "In the words of one of my baseball heroes, Yogi Berra, 'If you come to a fork in the road, take it.'"

*Here's Nikki Finke's take at Deadline.com:

Disney is adamantly telling people tonight that Dick Cook was not fired. But that's not what Cook himself is telling Hollywood tonight. There's been a lot of talk that Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige spent a lot of time with Disney CEO Bob Iger during the dealmaking, and Feige impressed the hell out of Iger. Of course, there's also the new DreamWorks CEO Stacey Snider whose resume includes running Universal, after all, and who could further cement Steven Spielberg's control at his new moviemaking home.