In Josh D’Amaro, the Walt Disney Co. tapped a CEO who looks straight out of central casting. Tall, handsome and charismatic, D’Amaro will have to navigate the media giant through a contracted, challenging environment.
The decision comes after a years-long search, with his appointment coming alongside the promotion of Dana Walden to president and, in the newly created position, chief creative officer. Both assume their new roles on March 18.
That D’Amaro won the CEO role over Walden, who is co-chief of Disney Entertainment, says much about the current state of the media powerhouse. For one, it’s the smoothest CEO transition since Walt Disney died. Outsiders Michael Eisner and Frank Wells were installed in 1984 after an elaborate greenmail attempt by corporate raiders and Eisner was then forced out to make way for Iger in 2005, following a campaign by Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney that led to Eisner’s removal from the board. Iger reluctantly left in 2020 only to return in 2022 after Bob Chapek’s reign went up in flames, defined largely by a series of unforced errors.
D’Amaro’s appointment also comes a day after Disney said that the Experiences division – which encompasses theme parks and cruise ships – topped $10 billion for the first time ever in the fiscal first quarter, much of which was due to actions taken by Disney veteran. If his appointment didn’t make it clear, TV and movies are no longer top dog at Disney. It’s the parks, even if Disney Chairman James Gorman told TheWrap that he considers Entertainment and Experiences two halves that are different but related: “IP and storytelling flow through both,” he said.
The 54-year-old D’Amaro is less a traditional executive and more a force of nature with cultish appeal. His slick veneer, adored by the throngs of loyal Disney fans, often obscures the more complicated machinations twitching and whirring underneath.
D’Amaro, who was born in 1971 (the same year Walt Disney World opened in Florida), shares a birthday with outgoing CEO Bob Iger (Feb. 10) and a similarly conservative sense of affluent middle-aged-man style. But unlike Iger, D’Amaro will occasionally display some school spirit: he wore a Mickey Mouse T-shirt to last year’s South by Southwest, where he co-hosted a panel called The Future of World-Building.
And if you have no idea who D’Amaro is – or what he stands for – that’s okay too.
“He’s a polymath in abilities,” Gorman said, who praised his decision-making abilities, curiosity and good personal values. “He checked a lot of boxes.”
“I think he’s amazing,” said a producer who works regularly with the company and D’Amaro himself. “Great energy. Everyone loves his leadership style. He is kind, charismatic and lives and breathes Disney as a culture.”
This producer also spoke of how D’Amaro is a great listener. This was a sentiment shared by a former Imagineer who had worked alongside D’Amaro. “Do not minimize the importance of even the impression that they’re listening to you,” this Imagineer said. D’Amaro’s measured approach, they said, ran in stark contrast to Chapek, who would frequently cut Imagineers off mid-pitch and simply shoo the idea away.
As a recent New York Times profile noted, D’Amaro doesn’t speak effusively about the first time he saw “Pinocchio” or his inaugural ride on It’s a Small World. He is distanced and disciplined, but also understands what works and what doesn’t about the parks on a minute level and the rides within them on a nearly microcosmic level (a telling detail from an interview with The Points Guy is D’Amaro being dismayed by chipped paint at Disneyland).
Maybe it’s this distance that gives him objectivity and perspective. And allows him to do the hard thing when the time calls for it.
As one former Disney exec noted, “Josh is going to have to be intimidating and swing a big club.”
His Disney history
D’Amaro, who studied art at Skidmore College before transferring to Georgetown to focus on marketing, briefly worked at Gillette before joining Disney in 1998.
Rebuilding Disney defined that period in the company’s history. After Eisner and Wells joined the company in 1984, it had gone on an unprecedented winning streak, with everything from its animated features to its theme park attractions benefitting from the fresh energy that Wells and Eisner brought to the company. As an example, it’s when R&D, a division within Imagineering, was formed. Bruce Vaughn, now head of Walt Disney Imagineering, got his start in this division.
But a few costly missteps, including the opening of the Euro Disney complex outside of Paris and the tragic death of Wells, which created a power vacuum and much internal strife, led to a more measured, gunshy approach to all aspects of the company.
For the first 10 years of his career at the company, D’Amaro held various positions, including becoming the chief financial officer of Disney Consumer Products in 2008. In 2010 he would begin his time within the Disney Parks section of the company, first as vice president of Adventures by Disney, which charts Disney-planned getaways, sometimes in conjunction with the Disney Cruise Line. In 2013 he became vice president of Disney’s Animal Kingdom, the zoo-like park within Walt Disney World, the sprawling resort outside of Orlando, Fla. He worked with James Cameron on that park’s wildly successful new land Pandora – The World of Avatar.
In 2014, after construction began on the “Avatar”-based project (which a recent Wall Street Journal report speculated cost $1.2 billion after being budgeted for $800 million), D’Amaro became senior vice president of Resort & Transportation Operations at Walt Disney World Resort. Afterwards he would ping-pong between coasts, first as the chief commercial officer of Walt Disney World, then as president of Disneyland in Anaheim, and then as president of Walt Disney World. By all accounts he worked hard and kept an eye on the bottom-line, moving between positions and climbing the corporate ladder, as frictionless as a river eel.
Since 2020, when D’Amaro assumed the role of chairman of Disney Experiences, a business unit that oversees the theme parks, cruise ships and retail operations, the cult of D’Amaro has grown among the theme parks’ most fervent fans.
At various events and activities, he would often accompany Iger, the two looking like long-lost brothers, D’Amaro without a hair out of place, his Apple Watch Ultra always glistening in the sun. He would hobnob with the stars, such as at the premiere of Marvel Studios’ “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” in 2023.
And within the vocal Disney fan community, he was becoming an absolute sensation. Anytime he entered the parks, he would be mobbed, with guests asking for selfies or to shake his hand. In 2021, there was a report of a woman at the Magic Kingdom in Florida, who got a photo with D’Amaro while wearing a shirt with the executive’s face on it.
An affable enforcer
This level of fandom for a serving Disney executive is odd, to say the least. Much of this has to do with D’Amaro’s handsomeness, which stands as both his defining trait and almost the only thing the public knows about him, since what he was doing with the division at the time was enough to make any diehard Disney fan revolt.
It was D’Amaro, under embattled CEO Bob Chapek (who served for a brief period between 2020 and 2022, when the board fired him and returned Iger to the iron throne), who was either directly involved or approved many of the more unpopular changes to the theme parks, including the removal of free FastPasses (a system that would allow you to wait in a comparatively shorter queue for your favorite attraction) and the cancellation of the Magical Express shuttle that would take guests from Orlando International Airport to their Disney hotel. A huge perk of that process was that your luggage would be moved from MCO to your hotel room – magically.
And under D’Amaro, there were a number of controversial moves, including increasing pricing on the stateside parks to a truly eye-watering degree (a single day at Disneyland could set you back over $220 per person); introducing airline-style dynamic pricing to Disneyland Paris that could soon be rolled out here; the slashing of the parks’ entertainment budgets (there’s an entire Doctor Strange-themed area of Avengers Campus in Disneyland but no Doctor Strange); and the closure and removal of beloved attractions like the Rivers of America at Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World and the totality of Dinoland, U.S.A., an opening-day land at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
Perhaps most catastrophically, it was under D’Amaro’s careful leadership that the Galactic Starcruiser opened in Walt Disney World. The immersive experience, meant to replicate the sensation of being on an interstellar cruise within the “Star Wars” continuum, was $1 billion gamble that was going to potentially unlock an entirely new revenue stream. Instead, it closed after a little more than a year and was converted into offices for Walt Disney Imagineering. It remains one of the costliest busts in the history of Disney Parks.
Somewhat tellingly, when D’Amaro hosted a lavish Disney Parks panel at the Honda Center in 2024 as part of D23, an all-Disney convention in Anaheim, Calif., he introduced a new “Monsters, Inc.”-themed land at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. But he purposefully showed off artwork that obscured where, exactly, the new project would be built. D’Amaro concealed that it would be replacing Muppet*Vision 3D, a fan-favorite attraction and the final project that Jim Henson worked on. Word leaked a few days later. But by then the die was cast.
It’s a perfect summation of D’Amaro as an executive – a man who is willing to make the tough choices and cater to the demands of the board and shareholders, but able to present them in the softest, sunniest way possible, packaged in a way that will never dent his cool exterior.
D’Amaro brings an unparalleled understanding of the company’s most important, most lucrative business unit – a division that will become even more important as the shifting sands of theatrical film distribution, the volatile streaming market and increased competition from Universal’s theme park division, along with the potential industry-changing emergence of the Netflix/Warner Bros. chimera, threaten to further destabilize an entertainment industry already in flux.
But hey, he’s got this. Just look at his hair.
