How Josh D’Amaro and Dana Walden’s Disney Fates are Intertwined

Dana Walden didn’t get the big CEO job at Disney. But she did get a big new job that will put her in almost as much of a fishbowl in Hollywood as Josh D’Amaro will face as he moves into Bob Iger’s office next month.

As president and chief creative officer, Walden is tasked with steering the ship of Disney’s TV and film studios and streaming platforms, aside from ESPN. She’s also part consiglieri and part Hollywood concierge to D’Amaro, who has no profile to speak of in the creative community that is still the essential storytelling fuel for Disney’s operations.

D’Amaro and Walden will inevitably go through a period of adjustment to the new hierarchy. And the transition at the top will have ripple effects for months across the ranks of Disney Entertainment and D’Amaro’s Experiences unit, which encompasses parks, cruises and consumer products. There will be comings and goings as the senior management ranks shuffle.

The biggest move for Walden is adding film operations to her purview. Since early 2023, Walden and Alan Bergman have served as co-chairs of Disney Entertainment, with Bergman leading film operations. Bergman was one of the final four internal contenders for the CEO gig. But in the summer, D’Amaro emerged as the candidate that Disney’s board saw as best equipped to be CEO.

“We were looking for people who had not just run good businesses, which is what I call necessary but not sufficient, but had the ability to grow into what a CEO does, which is very different from running a business,” says James Gorman, the chair of Disney’s board of directors, who spearheaded the succession planning after joining the panel in 2024. “Josh demonstrated the curiosity, innovation, energy, passion for the brand — all the intrinsic qualities.”

Walden’s new role is an explicit acknowledgment by the board that D’Amaro needs a capable and empowered lieutenant to run the film and TV-centric aspects of Disney’s business. There was no such scaffolding six years ago when Disney sought to replace Iger with Bob Chapek, a Disney lifer who also came from the parks and consumer products divisions.

Chapek took the job on the cusp of the COVID pandemic crisis, but he dug himself an even deeper hole by quickly implementing a radical restructuring of Disney’s studio activity. Chapek’s bifurcation of the studio’s production and distribution operations was rejected like a botched organ transplant by the core of the Mouse House’s creative executives, not to mention the creative community doing business with Disney, Marvel, Pixar, ABC, 20th Century Studios et al.

This time around, Walden is the respected veteran who will be leaned on to keep controversies at bay (see: Scarlett Johansson and 2021’s “Black Widow”) and introduce D’Amaro to the ways and means of the San Vicente Bungalows and Soho House crowds. At the same time, the TV veteran will have to learn the nitty-gritty of running a film studio and guide the production units, networks and platforms through the disruption that is only growing as generative AI becomes a force for content creation. Walden had a hand in crafting her responsibilities in the newly created role — a first for Disney — once it became clear that the board was leaning toward D’Amaro.

READ MORE: Brick by Brick, Dana Walden Drives Disney TV’s Bold New Era

The turmoil in Hollywood across so many fronts — from the business underpinnings of TV and film to the political backlash to coastal sensibilities that led to Trump’s return to the White House last year — has taken a huge toll on the earnings of every major media conglomerate. Disney has navigated the choppy waters better than most with the bold decision to embrace streaming by pouring the company’s top resources into Disney+, Hulu and now the stand-alone ESPN app.

On Walden’s watch, Disney’s TV platform and studio operations have threaded the needle with shows and franchises that lend themselves to what Disney does best — leverage its top properties across the company’s many outlets, from movies and TV shows to social media to theme parks.

Shows developed for Hulu — think “Only Murders in the Building” and “Paradise” — can play on ABC, and ABC’s stylish procedurals (“Will Trent,” “High Potential,” “9-1-1”) are among Hulu’s most-binged titles. Walden’s team has played the biggest role in growing Disney+ to worldwide prominence. Disney once could reliably count on hundreds of millions of dollars of profit rolling in for years and years from hit series such as “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Home Improvement” or a successful Marvel or Lucasfilm feature. The shift to streaming platforms has upended all of that. Disney+ is now turning a profit, but it’s a capital-intensive business that still has not made up for the losses from traditional syndication and international licensing.

Given this dynamic, the conventional wisdom that took shape over the past few months was that the board favored D’Amaro because the businesses in the Experiences kingdom will be the growth engines of the future. Gorman, who was chairman-CEO of Morgan Stanley for 13 years before joining the Disney board in 2024, says that’s overly simplistic for such a complicated business environment.

“That is the amateur’s narrative. My goodness, look at the entertainment businesses,” Gorman says. “We’ve got seven studios in the last two years under Alan’s leadership. They produced six billion-dollar movies. We have the ABC linear channel. We’ve got ESPN, a streaming platform that is now solidly profitable and continues to expand its margins. These are huge businesses that are half the company. So no, this is the board saying that. We were looking for the leader to run the whole company. But we love the businesses that make up this company. And I think for many years from now, you’ll see roughly 50-50 between parks and cruises and the rest of the company.”

For D’Amaro and Walden, the big news released before the markets opened on Feb. 3 marked the end of the line for the ultra-competitive process that hung heavy over the Magic Kingdom. Moving forward, their fates are tied together in a three-legged race that will be as public in the coming months as the CEO bake-off process has been for the past year.

(Pictured: Dana Walden and Josh D’Amaro)