A century-old American entertainment company. In 1957 Walt Disney drew a diagram of the firm's business model, with the film studio at the centre churning out movies, surrounded by ways to monetise the output: television, merchandise, publications, music and, at the bottom, the then-new Disneyland theme park.
Bob Iger ran the company from 2005 to 2020, a blockbuster stint during which Disney acquired the Star Wars and Marvel franchises and turned them into hit after hit. His chosen successor, Bob Chapek, struggled, and within three years Iger was back at the helm. His second act has been far less successful, as the company has grappled with digital disruption.
On February 3rd 2026 the board named Josh D'Amaro, head of the experiences division, as the next chief executive.
Disneyland has five sister parks around the world. A seventh is being built in Abu Dhabi. A new cruise ship, the Adventure, is set to sail in March 2026. Tickets for a single day at Disney's California park on a summer weekend can cost a family of four more than $1,000; once inside, visitors can pay extra to skip queues.
In the final three months of 2025 the experiences division—parks, cruises and merchandise—brought in 72% of Disney's operating profit. Only a decade earlier television had provided the lion's share.
Cable television has collapsed and the cinema box office has taken a big hit. Disney's streaming service, Disney+, is now profitable, but far less so than the old cable business. Disney+ faces competition not just from Netflix, but from social platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.
The creative engines appear to be sputtering. "The Mandalorian and Grogu", released on May 22nd 2026, is the first Star Wars cinema release in nearly seven years; its reported budget was $165m, modest by Star Wars standards. A bigger-budget Star Wars film, "Starfighter", with Ryan Gosling, is due in 2027. After acquiring Lucasfilm and the Star Wars brand from George Lucas for $4.1bn in 2012, Disney cranked out five new movies in the five years to 2019, grossing nearly $6bn worldwide, then put the cinema franchise in the deep freeze. Starting with "The Mandalorian" in 2019, Disney has made seven live-action Star Wars TV series, helping recruit subscribers to Disney+. Americans watched 33bn minutes of Star Wars content on TV in 2025, according to Nielsen—though the most-viewed remains the original 1977 film. Fans appear to be cooling on the Marvel superhero franchise.
Pixar, a pioneering animation studio owned by Disney, produced many of the genre's most successful films, from "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo" to "Inside Out". In 2011 Emma Coats, then a storyboard artist at Pixar, devised "22 Rules for Storytelling", advising film-makers to focus on character and emotion. Viewers "admire a character for trying more than for their successes", she reckoned. Though not company dogma, the dictums are evident in Pixar's most popular tales.
Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.