{"id":343432,"date":"2025-12-12T01:56:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T01:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/343432\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T01:56:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T01:56:09","slug":"dana-walden-talks-about-ceo-race-jimmy-kimmel-suspension","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/343432\/","title":{"rendered":"Dana Walden Talks About CEO Race & Jimmy Kimmel Suspension"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tDana Walden<\/a> has gone on the record on two topics that have swirled around Hollywood this year: the Disney<\/a> CEO race and Jimmy Kimmel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tWalden, who is Co-Chairman, Disney Entertainment, opened up about both topics in an interview with Bloomberg\u2019s The Circuit with Emily Chang.<\/p>\n

\n\tAsked what it\u2019s been like being one of the candidates to replace Bob Iger as CEO, Walden said, \u201cWell, being pit against my colleagues, I don\u2019t appreciate because we have incredible relationships. We are a very tight organization. But I have enormous faith in where this company\u2019s going. There is a world class team at this company who is navigating the path into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWalden is widely considered to be in a two-horse race against Josh D\u2019Amaro, Chairman of Disney Experiences, who runs the parks division. While there have been rumors about external candidates, Walden\u2019s colleague Alan Bergman, who is also Co-Chairman of Disney Entertainment, and who oversees the film business, and ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro are not thought to be in the running.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne person who would like Walden to become Disney CEO is Jimmy Kimmel.<\/a> The late-night host recently said that it would be \u201cvery foolish for me to answer that question but I happen to love Dana Walden very much, and I think she\u2019s done a great job\u201d.<\/p>\n

\n\tKimmel was taken off the air on September 17 after his comments about the killer of Charlie Kirk kicked off a major storm. That suspension, which came after local affiliate groups Nexstar and Sinclair pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! from their stations, lasted about a week with Kimmel returning to air on September 23.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile President Trump celebrated that decision, the Commander-in-Chief did not reach out to Disney. Asked whether Trump called Walden or Iger, she said, \u201cHe did not. We did not hear from them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWalden added that the company suspended Kimmel to \u201ctake the temperature down\u201d.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe were thinking about one only thing as we made that decision very close to his show going back up on that Wednesday, and that was, the situation was extremely heated,\u201d she said. We wanted to take the temperature down. We didn\u2019t think that was gonna be possible that night, so we hit pause to have conversations with Jimmy. We wanted to resolve the situation in a certain way to protect our employees, to think about our audience.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile JKL! was off the air, it was reported that Disney lost a number of subscriptions to streaming services such as Hulu. But the former Fox executive said \u201cthose reports were highly exaggerated\u201d. \u201cYou saw the number of subscribers that we reported during our earnings. We had a very strong quarter. I think that this issue is firmly in our past,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dana Walden has gone on the record on two topics that have swirled around Hollywood this year: the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":343433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[105798,3716,88,17114],"class_list":{"0":"post-343432","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-dana-walden","9":"tag-disney","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-jimmy-kimmel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}