What Disney's new CEO pick tells us about the future of media

• Josh D'Amaro, Disney's new CEO, has been running the company's parks business.
• He doesn't have any background in the company's TV/movie/streaming business.
• His ascension is a sign that streaming — the business that was supposed to reshape Disney — isn't nearly as important as Disney once thought.

In February 2020, Disney announced that it had picked a successor to CEO Bob Iger: Bob Chapek, who was running the company's parks unit.

That didn't work out.

Six years later, Disney is running it back. This time, it has picked parks boss Josh D'Amaro to replace Iger, who swears he's really leaving Disney for good this time.

The most obvious thing to say about D'Amaro's selection is that the parks business he oversees is Disney's most important business — a reliable profit and growth driver.

But a counterpoint to that is worth thinking about, too. It means the company's streaming business — the one Iger made a huge bet on back in 2017 — isn't the key to the company's future.

Puck's Julia Alexander, a longtime Disney reporter who also spent a year working on the company's strategy, talked to me about D'Amaro's rise and what it tells us about Disney and the broader media business. Below is an edited excerpt of our conversation on my Channels podcast this week.

Peter Kafka: Why did Disney, for the second time in six years, pick the guy who runs the parks business to run the entire company?

Julia Alexander: Because going forward, Disney will be more of an experiences company than it already has been, and less of a media-first company.

Disney's always been an experiences business. They're investing $60 billion [over 10 years] in that segment. It grew 6% in 2025, finishing at just over $36 billion. In the first quarter of the new year, it saw $10 billion in revenue. These are the basic data points that explain why D'Amaro is there.

But the fandom reason is that it's really difficult to try and predict what entertainment will look like a decade from now, let alone what Disney's role in entertainment will look like a decade from now — with YouTube coming in on the TV sets, with Instagram, with TikTok, with things that we haven't even seen yet.

Is the parks business growing because more people are going to parks every year? Or is it growing because Disney has figured out how to extract more money from the people who are going to parks?

Definitely the latter. It's this idea that people are willing to spend more on luxury experiences.

People will continue to spend because it is an experience that they're not going to get elsewhere, which means that [Disney] can monetize the customer at a higher rate than they're going to get in the content business.

Beyond the fact that D'Amaro runs parks, and parks are the key engine to Disney, what has he done during his tenure that suggests that he's really good at it?

Overseeing the launch of parks in China — Hong Kong, Shanghai. He's also the one who led the deal on investing in Epic Games, and looking at what the digital theme park component may look like.

There's also a quality to him. Someone at Disney said this to me the other day: He said there's Walt-like quality to him — as in Walt Disney — that Bob Iger [also] has.

Unlike the CEO of Apple or the CEO of Nike or any of these other big American brands, the CEO of Disney really means something to Disney fans.

He's a public figure.

He's a public figure. He walks the parks and people want to come up to him. They want to take photos with him.

This is something that Bob Chapek never had. He didn't want to hang out with the people who were creating his business, who were paying thousands of dollars to hang out in these parks.

Dana Walden, the other primary candidate for the job, is going to stay on with a new title of chief creative officer. She's supposed to run the film and TV business. Do they expect her to stick around?

If this was 2018, 2019 — the height of streaming subscribers and everyone investing in original content — I think the question of what happens to Dana Walden is much more interesting.

In 2026, streaming is a manageable operations business. The futurist component of it has gone away. Now it's just how do we get to 10% profit margins?

We know how it works. There's no mystery to running it. There's skill, but there's no mystery.

But just because Disney picked another parks guy, and just because parks is clearly the profit center of this company over the next 10 years, does not mean that Disney works as a non-media company. The media is so important to it.

So I think that D'Amaro will continue to focus on turning this very intangible adoration for intellectual property into tangible money at the parks level, but still rely on Walden and John Landgraf [who runs Disney's FX unit] and others to make sure that the content is keeping [customer] attention long term.

Six years ago, right before the pandemic came to the US, Bob Iger announced that he didn't want to be CEO anymore, and the guy running parks back then — Bob Chapek — replaced him. It didn't work out, for a bunch of reasons — one of which was that Bob Iger kind of left him a mess. What is he leaving to Josh D'Amaro this time around?

I think what Bob Iger has left Josh D'Amaro in 2026 versus what he left Bob Chapek in 2020 is a stark reality versus an optimistic hope. Streaming was [supposed to be] this reinvention of a business and of a behavior. You weren't just going to have a transition of customers, you're going to have a new customer. You were going to have a new type of content, a new type of monetization.

And very quickly, in the first few years after the pandemic, what we started to see was that it was a business. It wasn't creating new behaviors, it was just old behaviors in a different format.

That was really hard to square with analysts on Wall Street, when you've spent the last four or five years telling them that streaming is the future of your business.

There was this idea that streaming was going to be defined by how many subscribers you had. You could spend whatever you wanted. It didn't really matter. There's a lot of similarities to what's happening in the AI industry right now: This idea of just grow, grow, grow, grow, and we'll figure out revenue later. And then it all came crashing down. And all of a sudden Wall Street said, 'Okay, well, are you making money on this? And are you making, not just money, but 20% profit margins? Cable money?'

So that was a period of time where Bob Chapek had to navigate truly outlandish expectations. There was a hope that this was going to revolutionize everything. Now streaming's a manageable business.

What D'Amaro has is the stark reality of: 'We are not going to compete with YouTube. We are not going to compete with Instagram as they come to TV sets. We're not going to compete with TikTok. We're going to hope that some kind of theatrical strategy — lean on the "Avatars" and the Marvels — makes sense. We're going to hope that some of the Chinese theatrical market comes back.

But we don't have the optimism that we once did — that streaming is going to solve all of our woes, of the cable business declining and wiping out billions of dollars in profit. What we do have is a fundamental reality about what we can do with the parks business and what people are willing to spend on.'

So I think it's a perfect time for Iger to step back.

He's leaving at a time when there's not this optimism that whoever comes in is going to solve the entertainment and media business. It's an expectation that the guy who comes in is going to get us through this transitional period.