Disney Bets on Josh D’Amaro to Fuel Parks Growth

On Aug. 10, some 12,000 of The Walt Disney Co.’s most ardent fans gathered in Anaheim’s Honda Center waiting with bated breath. The entertainment giant was in the middle of its biennial D23 conference, and Saturday night was the flagship event for Disney’s Experiences division, where chairman Josh D’Amaro would lay out the company’s long-term plans.

What followed was part concert, part panel, and part Apple keynote, with musical performances from the likes of Meghan Trainor, Shaboozey, Rita Ora, and Plain White T’s, appearances from Billy Crystal, Ke Huy Quan, and John Stamos, and even a Steve Jobs-ian epilogue, with D’Amaro wrapping things up (some attendees were seen darting from their seats to the exits) before the Magic Mirror from Snow White appeared behind him, leading to a mic drop moment with the news that Disney was building a land at Walt Disney World dedicated to iconic Disney villains.

A month later, the highlights from that evening were on full display in front of thousands more people, this time in the form of a sizzle reel, as D’Amaro took the stage at the Inbound Conference in Boston Sept. 18.

“These fans, they travel from all over the world to attend D23 because they are incredibly loyal, and they follow every single move that we make,” D’Amaro told the crowd of marketing executives. “They’re looking for every bit of news that we have to share, and we gave them an almost overwhelming amount of that news just last month.”

Sitting in his green room backstage at the Boston Convention Center, D’Amaro said that delivering that cascade of new projects at D23 was a “very, very proud moment.”

“It comes from just the massive investment that we have put into making sure that we represent our fans’ biggest wishes,” D’Amaro said. “For me to be able to stand up on stage and present that in the form that we did, the energy coming back at me and the company, by virtue of that, was phenomenal.”

But it was also a long time coming.

A year ago the company gathered Wall Street analysts at Disney World in Orlando, and shared some significant news: The company was committing $60 billion to expand the division, nearly doubling its capex over 10 years.

Disney, however, remained coy on how it planned to deploy that cash, teasing “new stories” and added capacity at both its parks and cruise line division.

It was at D23 when the strategy burst into the open.

Disney’s parks, division, after all, is where “you’re taken right out of the real world and we put you inside the story,” D’Amaro told the Inbound audience.

“These experiences are an investment in new ways of telling stories for brand new generations of Disney fans,” he added. “We absolutely have to get this right, and so that means how we tell these stories is incredibly important.”

It’s a big, bold bet, with tens of billions of dollars on the line.

And it also comes as Disney is trying to transform itself while simultaneously figuring out who will lead the company into the future. Disney CEO Bob Iger is under contract through 2026, but both he and the company’s board are said to be laser-focused on finding a successor.

D’Amaro is seen as one of the leading internal candidates, alongside Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden. The executive, however, insists that he is “squarely focused” on pulling off his own division’s transformation and expansion.

The Walt Disney Co. knows full well how important its parks and experiences business is, not just to its balance sheet, but also its future.

Disney’s experiences division, like the rest of the company, is undergoing both an evolution and a revolution in response to the transformative changes impacting the larger entertainment industry, and it is adapting accordingly.

The guiding light for the company however, remains Walt Disney’s legendary 1957 diagram, with the “creative talent of studio theatrical films” at the center, and everything else spilling out from that central core, from TV and books to music and Disneyland. The corporate flywheel has expanded since then (there are now a lot more theme parks, plus cruise ships, TV studios, streaming services, sports, etc.) but the basic principle is the same.

D’Amaro showed the diagram in his Inbound presentation, telling the audience that “we’re still following this model that Walt created today. Stories are at the center of everything that we do, they’re the creative engine for our entire company.”

And so those stories are now at the center of his division’s ambitious expansion plan.

“I think we start with the fact that there is no other company in the world that has such a treasure trove of stories to tell, we’re incredibly fortunate in that regard,” D’Amaro tells The Hollywood Reporter, adding that the company also listens to what its fans want. “Our fans have points of view, they have things they want to see come to life. Monsters Inc. was a great example of that, you heard the reaction at D23, our fans want that.”

And, increasingly, it seems that Disney’s creative talent wants it as well.

At D23, D’Amaro was joined on stage by the likes of Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige, Lucasfilm executive Dave Filoni, Pixar chief Pete Docter, and Frozen creator and then-Disney Animation CCO Jennifer Lee to announce new projects. He also participated in scripted moments, including a spirited routine with Billy Crystal, who voiced Mike Wazowski in Monsters Inc.

“These people are my friends. Jennifer Lee is my friend, Kevin Feige is my friend, we know one another, and we’re spending a lot of time together,” D’Amaro says, framing the internal conversations about where to put their resources as “a bit of an art and a science.”

The art, of course, comes from the creatives, who built characters and worlds that resonate with consumers (during his Inbound presentation D’Amaro showed a video of himself and Lee exploring the Frozen land at Hong Kong Disneyland), and the science comes from understanding what each distinct audience wants.

“This is a franchise property with characters that resonate in this marketplace, it’s a film that we knew we were going to continue to invest in, and it’s also a world that the Imagineers knew with all their hearts they could bring to life,” D’Amaro says. “This story works with these fans, they’re coming in droves. They’re coming and saying they specifically came here to visit Zootopia.”

Those internal deliberations, the give and take between the creative side and the business side, are behind every major investment.

“Our creative communities, including Imagineering, is always alive and bubbling with ideas and concepts and brainstorming. In fact, Imagineering, I don’t think, has ever been more alive and more excited about the future than they are right now,” D’Amaro says. “What that basically means is that there are ideas that are being thrown on the table all of the time, and we’re debating which of these ideas will resonate most with our guests. Which of these can we translate into something that’s going to bring that story to life in a new form, or take it in a new direction? What are our fans asking for?

“And we deliberate that, whether it’s with Jen Lee or Kevin Feige or [Lucasfilm chief] Kathy Kennedy, we debate those things vigorously in a healthy way, and then internally, even at WDI, to make sure that we’re landing on the best possible option to tell the stories that we want to tell,” he adds.

That can sometimes cause anxiety among Disney fans. After D23, some Disney park regulars grumbled that a pair of new Cars rides coming to the Magic Kingdom would replace Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer Island, and expressed concern that the Monsters Inc. land might displace a popular Muppets-themed attraction.

But it is a path Disney has gone down before. When Disney shut down California Adventure’s Twilight Zone: Tower of Terror ride and reopened it in 2017 with a Guardians of the Galaxy theme, for example, ridership increased significantly, despite the risk associated with making big changes to a beloved attraction.

Or as Morgan Stanley’s Ben Swinburne wrote Aug. 13: “These experiential investments can only generate compelling returns if they leverage popular and relevant IP: As Disney investors prepare to underwrite a rising capital spending outlook … confidence in the returns available is anchored in Disney’s ability to continue to build new brands and franchises while injecting new life into existing IP.”

Disney’s Imagineers also have a track record of creating their own IP. Rides like Pirates of the Caribbean and Jungle Cruise have since been turned into feature films. And on stage at the Inbound conference, D’Amaro brought out two BDX droids, remote-controlled robots that debuted at the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge land at Disneyland earlier this year. They were never in a Star Wars film or TV series, but they feel like a part of the larger universe.

Thanks to their advanced animatronics (and human controllers), the droids are able to emote and engage with visitors. “These guys are technological marvels, but it is more than that. It’s what Imagineers do with that tech that takes it over the top,” D’Amaro said.

“It wouldn’t actually surprise me if you were to see these guys in a Star Wars movie someday,” he added (it’s worth noting that there’s a Mandalorian movie coming in 2026). “That would be a full circle moment.”

The executive has a few full circle moments, and they inform how the company approaches its projects.

On stage, D’Amaro shares an anecdote about his own first Disney experience. He grew up in Medfield, just a few miles outside of Boston, and his parents were in the Boston Convention Center crowd to watch him speak.

He recalled a trip to Disneyland with his family as a kid. His father took him on Peter Pan’s Flight, one of the park’s original attractions.

“I remember my pop saying before we arrived at Disney: ‘Josh, it really feels like you’re flying when you’re on this attraction, you’re not going to believe it,’” he recalled. “You know what? He was right.”

Some 30 years later, D’Amaro took his own kids on a newer attraction at Disneyland: Soarin’, which sees riders lifted into the air as they fly above many of the wonders of the world.

“Before I took my family, I said ‘it’s going to really feel like you’re flying, you’re not gonna believe it,’” he said. “Going from Peter Pan to Soarin’, that didn’t happen overnight, those two attractions were about a half century apart, but their connection to another one of Disney’s core storytelling principles, and that’s innovation.”

Using innovation to create that emotional connection is at the core of D’Amaro’s effort to expand Disney’s experiences business, and it speaks to both the evolution and the revolution facing Disney as a whole.

“Bringing new fans in, that creates that generational effect that I was talking about [on stage],” D’Amaro says. “We want to make sure that any story that we decide to bring to life — and there were a lot of them that we announced at D23 — has kind of an enduring effect, something that we know that can stand the test of time and our guests will continue to want to participate with, it creates those emotional memories that I just talked about.”

On the evolutionary front, that means building new rides, attractions and lands, so that future generations can have the same experience in Disney’s theme parks that D’Amaro and his family had (a good example is Mickey’s Toontown in Disneyland, which uses classic IP to appeal to families with younger children). But it also means trying to bring the Disney experience to new places.

One piece of that puzzle is Disney’s cruise line, with D’Amaro announcing four new ships at D23. The new ships will essentially double the size of Disney’s fleet by the end of this decade … and many of those ships will sail from countries without a Disney park, providing a closer opportunity for families to experience what his division has to offer.

To put some numbers to the cruise business potential, Swinburne wrote that the cruise division could have $10 billion in revenue and $3 billion in EBITDA by 2031. “For context, the cruise business exiting this decade could be larger in EBITDA than ESPN in 2024,” he wrote.

The revolutionary piece is a bigger gamble. As with Disney’s entertainment division and ESPN, D’Amaro believes that digital is a growth business for the part of the company he oversees.

But while entertainment and sports are laser-focused on the streaming experience, D’Amaro has his sights set on interactive gaming.

“This is the future for our company, and it’s going to be an incredible space for us,” D’Amaro says.

When Bob Iger returned as Disney’s CEO in late 2022, he met with D’Amaro and Disney games chief Sean Shoptaw.

“The first thing they showed me were demographic trends,” Iger told CNBC earlier this year. “And when I saw Gen Z and Gen Alpha and even Millennials, I saw the amount of time they were spending in terms of their total media screen time on video games, it was stunning to me, equal to what they spend on TV and movies.”

“The conclusion I reached was we have to be there and we have to be there as soon as we possibly can in a very compelling way,” he added.

The result was a massive deal with Fortnite studio Epic Games, with Disney investing $1.5 billion in the company, and partnering to create an interactive universe based on Disney’s characters and properties.

 D’Amaro describes what the company has planned as “a place where you can play games, a place where you can be social, a place where users can generate their own content.”

“We envision essentially a universe that we’re going to build where all our stories can come to life. They can come to life in different forms, [like] games. They can come to life in ways that you can just interact with and play with the franchise in a way that’s meaningful to you, a place where you can actually build,” he adds. “And we think that this is going to be a place where all fans can come and interact 365 days a year.”

The big bet is that consumers that engage with this universe will create their own Disney experiences, manifesting an entirely new way to interact with the brand and its characters. Just as streaming has changed the way that Disney fans watch their favorite stories, the company is betting that the new Epic Games universe can change the way that they experience those stories.

On stage, D’Amaro framed the Epic Games bet as being true to the vision of Walt Disney himself, noting that the founder was an “adventurer” and a “risk-taker.”

“We should never rest on past success. We should always look for the next big idea, the next big challenge. If we’d always relied on what worked in the past, the Walt Disney Company might not exist today,” he said. “As consumer preferences continue to shift, we have to adapt, or we are going to be left behind.”

That digital pivot also comes as Disney’s parks division — after seeing double digit growth over the last few years post-pandemic — has seen its revenue moderate in recent months. It was still up 2 percent in the company’s fiscal Q3, but Disney CFO Hugh Johnston warned that “demand moderation” will be present over the next few quarters.

While the softness is across the sector (at Universal’s parks revenue fell by 10 percent in the quarter), it nonetheless adds a sense of urgency to the current moment.

Ultimately, MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman argued in an Aug. 13 note that the pain is likely to be temporary, particularly with what the company has lined up post-D23.

“While investor focus understandably remains on the near-term trends at Parks, we think these announcements combined with the recent content success highlight the depth and breadth of Disney’s premium I.P. that plays a crucial role in its content flywheel to power long-term earnings growth,” Fishman wrote.

The hardest part might just be meeting the expectations of Disney’s legions of fans, the people gathering by the thousands in Anaheim to cheer on the announcement of a Greatest Showman musical, or a new Disneyland parade, let alone a new theme park attraction or interactive world.

Those expectations are most obvious inside Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Disneyland Paris, Shanghai Disneyland and all of the other places where the company’s creativity merges with the real world.

When D’Amaro was named president of Disneyland in 2018, he joined his predecessor Michael Colglazier in Walt Disney’s old apartment in the park, continuing a tradition among its leaders.

In the apartment, they cooked chili and grilled cheese sandwiches, two of Walt’s favorites.

“We actually made it on Walt’s own hot plate, just like he used to do when he was in the park,” D’Amaro recalled, adding that they stood on Walt’s patio and watched guests walk by. “At that moment, I must admit that I felt the weight and the responsibility that I was taking on, because Disney fans, they take their fandom very, very seriously.”

If Disney’s studios are its creative engines, powering the stories that move the company forward, Disney’s experiences are its emotional core, taking those characters and lands and bringing them to life to form lasting bonds with fans. It’s Walt Disney’s flywheel, as articulated some 66 years ago, where every part of the company delivers a different piece of the puzzle, now with $60 billion backing it.

“Disney is at its best when the whole company converges into one,” D’Amaro says. “This is the Disney difference. It’s why I think the company is so special.”