#bob-chapek

#bob-chapek

Nineteen-year-old Mabel Tanaka has always used nature as a means of calming her volatile emotions, decompressing in the silence of the placid pond near her house with her beloved grandmother by her side. But as Mabel grows from a sullen teen to a young adult, her coping mechanisms fall away one by one. Her parents move away, her grandmother dies, and the pond, the last stable place in her life, is deserted by the wildlife that once gave her so much comfort, and scheduled to be paved over for a new highway.

The Disney Experiences segment just delivered record quarterly revenue of $10.006 billion, and D'Amaro built that machine. The segment generated $9.99 billion in full-year operating income for FY2025, making it the company's most profitable division. A CEO whose fingerprints are all over that result is not a liability.

A retired Navy admiral who oversaw the construction of Disneyland and helped Walt Disney build what many regarded as a fool's folly emerges as the unsung hero of a new documentary film about the birth of the Anaheim theme park. The new Disneyland Handcrafted documentary by filmmaker Leslie Iwerks on the one-year blitz to create the first Disney theme park will debut Jan. 22 on YouTube and the Disney+ streaming service.

Josh D'Amaro appears to be the frontrunner in the race to be Disney's next CEO, and the Mouse House's latest quarterly earnings showed why. Disney's experiences business, which D'Amaro oversees, is the backbone of a company that's being weighed down by the struggling pay-TV business and isn't yet lifted up by its streaming profits. And when that part of the business sneezes, the stock catches a cold.

Instead, he focused on the last three years, when he returned to the CEO role in 2022 after leaving it in 2020. When he first came back, the streaming business had lost $4 billion that year, Iger said, and required massive organizational restructuring to "create more accountability." All that effort seems to have paid off, financially speaking. Last quarter, Disney's SVOD services grew 11% year-over-year to more than $5 billion, driven by growth in both subscription and advertising revenue.