Disney Experiences Chairman Josh D’Amaro has been elevated to CEO of the Walt Disney Co., capping a closely watched multiyear process of identifying Bob Iger‘s successor.
Dana Walden, Disney Entertainment Co-Chairman, has been named President and Chief Creative Officer, a newly created role.
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Disney’s board of directors voted unanimously on the moves, which were announced Tuesday and will take effect at the company’s annual meeting March 18. The board also intends to add D’Amaro to the board at the meeting.
Walden will report directly to D’Amaro. Iger is staying on as a senior advisor until the end of his current contract on December 31, surrendering the CEO title at the meeting.
“Josh D’Amaro is an exceptional leader and the right person to become our next CEO,” Iger said in the official announcement. “He has an instinctive appreciation of the Disney brand, and a deep understanding of what resonates with our audiences, paired with the rigor and attention to detail required to deliver some of our most ambitious projects. His ability to combine creativity with operational excellence is exemplary and I am thrilled for Josh and the company.”
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Walden “is an excellent leader who commands tremendous respect from the creative community,” Iger added. “Given that creativity is at the heart of everything Disney does, she is a wonderful choice to serve in this new leadership role.”
Disney Chairman James Gorman said D’Amaro “possesses that rare combination of inspiring leadership and innovation, a keen eye for strategic growth opportunities, and a deep passion for the Disney brand and its people – all of which make him the right person to take the helm as Disney’s next CEO.”
The press release announcing the moves did not include specifics about Walden’s new duties. It said she will “ensure that storytelling and creative expression across every audience touchpoint consistently reflect the brand, engage audiences at scale, and advance core business objectives, while driving enterprise-wide initiatives and translating vision into action.”
D’Amaro, 54, is a 28-year company veteran. He had been one of four internal CEO candidates, along with Walden, ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro and Entertainment Co-Chairman Alan Bergman. Pitaro and Bergman will continue to serve in their current posts, the company said.
During the multiyear efforts of the Disney board’s succession committee, a couple of names of external candidates briefly surfaced but did not appear to gain traction with the committee. With 231,000 global employees, a business spanning several continents and a singular consumer brand, Disney would present a formidable challenge for any outside leader. D’Amaro is just the eighth person to hold the title since the company’s founding in 1923.
The company had reportedly considered making D’Amaro and Walden Co-CEOs but ended up going the conventional solo route. While splitting the top job in two remains unusual in the corporate world, it has recently gained favor in entertainment, with Netflix, Comcast and Spotify adopting the structure.
After joining Disney in 1998 in an exec role at Disneyland, D’Amaro has gone on to hold posts in the U.S. and internationally across finance, business strategy, marketing, creative development and operations. He was promoted to head the company’s parks unit in 2020 and had to navigate through the months-long shutdowns and uncertainty of Covid. His past positions include Chief Financial Officer of Disney Consumer Products Global Licensing, and president of Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Florida. A Boston native, D’Amaro graduated from Georgetown.
Walden and Bergman were named co-heads of the entertainment unit in 2023 after Iger restructured the company to give studio execs more responsibility in streaming. Her portfolio has included the operations of ABC, Disney Television Studios and FX as well as direct-to-consumer, technology and ad sales groups, along with international content and operations.
Under Walden, who came to Disney in 2019 after the company acquired most of 21st Century Fox (where she was CEO of Fox Television Group), ABC has been the No. 1 entertainment network for the past four years. Among the notable titles she has shepherded are ABC comedy series Abbott Elementary and Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building. Known for her way with talent, the former publicist earned a public shout-out from Jimmy Kimmel last fall for navigating a challenging sequence of events with his late-night show. Jimmy Kimmel Live! was pulled off the air for several days after an uproar over an aside in Kimmel’s monologue about the reaction among many Donald Trump supporters to the murder of Charlie Kirk.
The Disney succession process was spearheaded by Gorman, the veteran finance executive who became chairman of the company’s board of directors last year. Gorman was CEO of Morgan Stanley from 2010 to 2023. He won points at the bank and on Wall Street with his deft handling of his own succession process, a task that Disney has notably struggled with since Michael Eisner clung to power in the early 2000s.
Iger, 74, reversed his own stated retirement plans multiple times during his initial tenure as CEO, which began in 2006, before finally departing in 2020. The decision at the time to give the top job to Disney veteran Bob Chapek, best known for his stints in the company’s home entertainment, consumer products and theme park units, backfired after Chapek made a number of missteps.
Chapek’s miscues were magnified because Iger didn’t fully exit the organization. Instead, he stayed on as executive chairman for nearly a year and retained the nebulous duty of “directing creative endeavors” at the company. After Chapek was ousted by the board in 2022, Iger returned to the corner office, with a more robust structure around the effort to determine who would lead the company after his contract expires at the end of 2026. Nearly six years after Iger’s seismic move – which stunned the media and business worlds and came just prior to the devastation of Covid and when the exec was well shy of his 70th birthday – his motivations to leave remain largely a mystery.
Parks, resorts, cruise ships and other components of the Experiences division have become a reliable growth engine for Disney, which in 2023 announced plans to invest $60 billion on the segment over 10 years. One marquee project is a new theme park planned for the Middle Eastern emirate of Abu Dhabi. Apps and video games are also under Experiences, meaning D’Amaro managed the company’s relationship with Epic Games, encouraging Iger to back the plan to take an equity stake in the company in 2023. Revenue in the Experiences segment grew 6% in fiscal 2025 compared with the prior year, finishing at $36.2 billion. Entertainment revenue grew 3% to $42.5 billion.
Artificial intelligence will be the next frontier for Disney, with the technology now being deployed in parks and in some aspects of film and TV production. After threatening legal action against Google and suing a smaller AI player, Midjourney, Disney last December stunned the entertainment and tech sectors by investing in OpenAI and granting the Sora video platform maker licenses to select characters. Tensions between AI firms and Hollywood remain, though, with above-the-line guilds soon to start contract talks with Disney and other studios and streamers.
As Iger himself has conceded, the role of Disney CEO has gotten far more complex and challenging in recent years, as Disney and other traditional media companies have sought to respond to competition from Silicon Valley. Disney’s post-Iger leaders will face number of headaches, including managing ongoing declines in linear TV, coping with the surging cost of sports rights and refining the strategy in streaming. During Iger’s first stint as CEO, he spearheaded a number of moves, chief among them the $71.3 billion acquisition of most of 21st Century Fox, as the legacy media player committed to direct-to-consumer streaming.
While Disney’s overall streaming business has turned a profit within the past year, the margins and future economic profile of streaming remain murky for all recent challengers to Netflix.
Iger left his first chapter as CEO as perhaps one of the most widely respected executives in corporate America. In the fall of 2019, he published his memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime, in which he recounted accomplishments like the string of acquisitions of Pixar, Lucasfilm and Marvel.
Soon after returning, however, Iger was confronted by a proxy battle waged by activist investor Nelson Peltz. Believing the company had lost its way in many areas, Peltz spent tens of millions of dollars in an effort to get multiple execs added to Disney’s board of directors. He also repeatedly criticized Disney for being inefficient and too wedded to its past.
Iger and Disney ultimately prevailed in the fight, which fizzled out in early 2023 after at one point seeming to threaten Iger’s legacy. One key move initiated by Iger in 2022, as the proxy war was heating up, was initiating multiple rounds of cost cuts and layoffs. Ultimately, those cutbacks achieved $7.5 billion in cost savings, well north of the initial target of $5.5 billion, according to the company. In all, about 7,000 employees were affected, among them numerous long-tenured executives in Burbank and a host of familiar on-air faces on ESPN.
Iger fielded numerous succession questions from Wall Street analysts during Disney’s quarterly earnings call Monday morning. He was invited to offer advice to his successor and reflect on his return and the state of the company as the management baton pass unfolds.
“The good news is that the company is in much better shape today than it was three years ago,” he said. “We have done a lot of fixing but also put in place a number of opportunities. In a world that changes as much as it does, in some form or another trying to preserve the status quo is a mistake and I’m certain my successor will not do that.”
hmmmmm…… a little to late. As much as I admire what Disney was able to accomplish, they did miss a critical opportunity, as time will tell shortly. Time to bring in the consolidator to finalize this story…. Apple
It’s a shame, I still feel Dana would have been a better choice for CEO…
100% – Dana was made for the job and consistently proved to be an exec who spearheaded incredibly successful endeavors. Perhaps because she didn’t have “PARK” experience was the reason, but I think it’s easier to have park experience than film & Tv experience.