{"id":448961,"date":"2026-02-04T18:27:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T18:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/448961\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T18:27:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T18:27:09","slug":"how-josh-damaro-and-dana-waldens-disney-fates-are-intertwined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/448961\/","title":{"rendered":"How Josh D’Amaro and Dana Walden’s Disney Fates are Intertwined"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tDana Walden<\/a> didn\u2019t get the big CEO job at Disney<\/a>. But she did get a big new job that will put her in almost as much of a fishbowl in Hollywood as Josh D\u2019Amaro will face as he moves into Bob Iger\u2019s office next month.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs president and chief creative officer, Walden is tasked with steering the ship of Disney\u2019s TV and film studios and streaming platforms, aside from ESPN. She\u2019s also part consiglieri and part Hollywood concierge to D\u2019Amaro, who has no profile to speak of in the creative community that is still the essential storytelling fuel for Disney\u2019s operations.<\/p>\n

\n\tD\u2019Amaro 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\u2019Amaro\u2019s Experiences unit, which encompasses parks, cruises and consumer products. There will be comings and goings as the senior management ranks shuffle.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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\u2019Amaro emerged as the candidate that Disney\u2019s board saw as best equipped to be CEO.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe 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,\u201d says James Gorman, the chair of Disney\u2019s board of directors, who spearheaded the succession planning after joining the panel in 2024. \u201cJosh demonstrated the curiosity, innovation, energy, passion for the brand \u2014 all the intrinsic qualities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWalden\u2019s new role is an explicit acknowledgment by the board that D\u2019Amaro needs a capable and empowered lieutenant to run the film and TV-centric aspects of Disney\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tChapek 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\u2019s studio activity. Chapek\u2019s bifurcation of the studio\u2019s production and distribution operations was rejected like a botched organ transplant by the core of the Mouse House\u2019s creative executives, not to mention the creative community doing business with Disney, Marvel, Pixar, ABC, 20th Century Studios et al.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis time around, Walden is the respected veteran who will be leaned on to keep controversies at bay (see: Scarlett Johansson and 2021\u2019s \u201cBlack Widow\u201d) and introduce D\u2019Amaro 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 \u2014 a first for Disney \u2014 once it became clear that the board was leaning toward D\u2019Amaro.<\/p>\n

\n\tREAD MORE: Brick by Brick, Dana Walden Drives Disney TV\u2019s Bold New Era<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tThe turmoil in Hollywood across so many fronts \u2014 from the business underpinnings of TV and film to the political backlash to coastal sensibilities that led to Trump\u2019s return to the White House last year \u2014 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\u2019s top resources into Disney+, Hulu and now the stand-alone ESPN app.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Walden\u2019s watch, Disney\u2019s TV platform and studio operations have threaded the needle with shows and franchises that lend themselves to what Disney does best \u2014 leverage its top properties across the company\u2019s many outlets, from movies and TV shows to social media to theme parks.<\/p>\n

\n\tShows developed for Hulu \u2014 think \u201cOnly Murders in the Building\u201d and \u201cParadise\u201d \u2014 can play on ABC, and ABC\u2019s stylish procedurals (\u201cWill Trent,\u201d \u201cHigh Potential,\u201d \u201c9-1-1\u201d) are among Hulu\u2019s most-binged titles. Walden\u2019s 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 \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy\u201d or \u201cHome Improvement\u201d 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\u2019s a capital-intensive business that still has not made up for the losses from traditional syndication and international licensing.<\/p>\n

\n\tGiven this dynamic, the conventional wisdom that took shape over the past few months was that the board favored D\u2019Amaro 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\u2019s overly simplistic for such a complicated business environment.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat is the amateur\u2019s narrative. My goodness, look at the entertainment businesses,\u201d Gorman says. \u201cWe\u2019ve got seven studios in the last two years under Alan\u2019s leadership. They produced six billion-dollar movies. We have the ABC linear channel. We\u2019ve 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\u2019ll see roughly 50-50 between parks and cruises and the rest of the company.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor D\u2019Amaro 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t(Pictured: Dana Walden and Josh D\u2019Amaro)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dana Walden didn\u2019t get the big CEO job at Disney. But she did get a big new job…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":448962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,105798,3716,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-448961","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-dana-walden","10":"tag-disney","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448961","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=448961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/448962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}