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When Bob Iger stepped down as Disney CEO in February 2020, the vision of installing Bob Chapek as his successor was about company synergy. The idea was that Disney had all these iconic brands that Iger had assembled like Infinity Stones, and they now needed someone to bring it all together and reach the consumer directly via Disney+ and all of the Mouse House’s other experiences.
IndieWire wrote at the time that Chapek’s appointment was “such a wise choice” because he had experience managing Disney’s theme parks and toys, and he could help offer a “pipeline of experiences, stories, and products to people around the globe.”
That vision didn’t work out so well.
Chapek couldn’t control the pandemic that would greet him not a month later, but he alienated the company’s talent relationships by letting Disney’s data team, not its creative leads, dictate content decisions; by punting Pixar movies to streaming; by getting Scarlett Johansson livid enough to sue; and by bungling the company’s response to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Chapek lost billions trying to make Disney+ work, and it turns out a strong connection with Hollywood was key to the synergy Disney was after.
Today, Bob Iger is retiring again, and he’s handing over the reins to another new CEO whose primary focus had been the Parks division of Disney. A bad succession plan was what led Iger to come back the last time.
So what makes this new Parks guy different this time around? Well, D’Amaro has a partner Chapek didn’t have: Dana Walden.
D’Amaro is CEO, but Walden, who was also a candidate to be Disney’s first-ever female CEO, reports directly to him as President and Chief Creative Officer. She’s got creative oversight over all creative decisions at Disney, and as disclosed in a memo this week, the video games division that D’Amaro helped blossom the last few years now is integrated into Disney Entertainment and reports to her.
D’Amaro in this first message to staff as CEO said that “great storytelling and creative excellence will remain our North Star.” “They underpin every decision we make. We will continue to raise the bar, take smart risks, learn quickly, and deliver work that exceeds our audiences’ expectations and our own,” he wrote in the memo.
His key lieutenant in executing that will be Walden, who is keeping around her prior partner at Disney Entertainment in Alan Bergman, and she’s tapping execs to lead direct to consumer, television, and games all underneath her. Much like Donna Langley at NBCUniversal, who calls the shots for all the studio’s creative endeavors for both film and TV, Disney now has a woman at the top whose sole focus is entertainment. We previously called Langley the most powerful woman in Hollywood, and Walden may give her some competition for that title.
“The question is how the outside of the community can avoid becoming Bob Chapek. If the two form a good working relationship, Dana can help him work toward that. As far as I understand, this is the board working to keep two great executives,” said Stephen Galloway, dean of the Dodge Film School at Chapman University.
Galloway says the key difference between Langley and Walden’s situations is that Langley is paired with a true business person at Comcast, and it hasn’t been a situation where a new person is stepping into the CEO role. For Walden and D’Amaro, the two are being paired together in a working partnership, with Walden having experience within the creative community dating back decades and D’Amaro getting his footing in that world, all while he’s replacing a CEO in Iger who prided himself on being so plugged into the creative community.
As of yet, Galloway says that partnership between Walden and D’Amaro is “untested,” and their success and failure will be dictated by how well they can work together and share credit. Walden, when she was at 20th Century Fox before Fox was acquired by Disney, had a phenomenal partnership with executive Gary Newman. That was another shotgun marriage put together by a board of directors looking to keep around two great executives, and the two were ultimately inseparable.
In the case of Chapek, he still had Iger looming over him, and the hope is that this time Iger actually steps aside and lets D’Amaro and Walden do their thing. But their initial challenges will be figuring out the future of a lot of things for which Iger has already laid the groundwork, including building out the standalone ESPN, merging Disney+ and Hulu, and charting a future for Disney’s linear networks.
Insiders say vibes are good amid the transition and that there’s optimism now that there’s clarity and stability after a very long successor search.
Whatever that future looks like, Walden has all the power in the world to make it her own. Added Dalloway, “Dana may not have the top job, but she, along with Donna, is the most powerful woman in Hollywood today, and good for her.”
English (US) ·