Disney’s CEO faces an existential crisis brought on by an emerging technology that threatens to transform his core product—expensive-to-produce and tightly controlled entertainment—into something cheap enough for anyone to create, keeps audiences at home instead of taking them out, and disrupts the economics of the entire entertainment industry.
The year is 1955. The emerging technology is television. And the CEO of Disney is Walt Disney. Now, as he takes over as the ninth CEO in the company’s 102-year history, Josh D’Amaro is forced to confront his own existential crisis brought on by an emerging technology — artificial intelligence. The way Disney’s founder, namesake and first CEO overcame the crisis of his time may offer D’Amaro a model for his own.
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After World War II, the explosion of home televisions devastated the movie business. A study by the Stanford Research Institute found that movie attendance fell 64% between 1946 and 1954, with similar losses in other forms of public-facing entertainment.
Hollywood executives tried to mobilize the entire industry against television as a common threat. But the data was more complex: total spending on leisure had not declined. What changed was the way people spent their time and money. Participatory types of leisure, those that took families out of the house and put them on the road, remained stable or grew.
At the 1952 conference of the National Association of Amusement Parks, Pools and Beaches, Ed Schott of Cincinnati’s Coney Island got right to the point. As Billboard summarized, “Park managers need not fear television as a competitor, because the medium cannot offer the sense of participation that parks provide.”
Walt Disney’s response was to do something the rest of Hollywood considered reckless, even treacherous: he embraced the “enemy.” In 1954, he sold ABC a weekly television series called Disneyland in exchange for $2.5 million and a one-third stake in the theme park he planned to build.
The deal shocked the film establishment, which was trying to keep talent away from TV. But Disney realized what his peers refused to accept: television was not going away, and studios that treated it as a threat rather than a tool would be left behind.
When Walt Disney opened Disneyland, he wasn’t making a desperate gamble on an impossible dream. He was diversifying into the two fastest-growing sectors of the entertainment economy at a time when his studio’s core business was in free fall.
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And he understood, crucially, that television and the park were not separate initiatives, but a single ecosystem. As he told the TV audience on October 27, 1954, “Later in the program you will see that Disneyland the place and Disneyland the TV show are part of a whole.” The program promoted the park, the park promoted the films, and the films sold products.
The results confirmed this. By the end of the 1959–1960 season, Disneyland’s attendance had grown 43.6% over its opening year, generating about $1.5 million in new revenue, while Walt Disney Productions studio income had fallen by more than $1 million. The park was the lifeline that allowed the studio to survive a seismic technological shift.
The lesson was clear: when new technology turns content into a commodity, the company that invests in irreplaceable physical experiences is the one that survives. Seven decades later, the Walt Disney Company is being tested to see if it remembers this.
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Faced with current challenges — an underperforming studio, a streaming business that still doesn’t sustain consistent profitability, and a creative pipeline criticized for being overly derivative — many expected outgoing CEO Bob Iger to pick a studio executive to revitalize Disney’s creative core. But for the second time in less than six years, Iger chose a theme park executive as his successor.
The first experience did not last long nor did it end well. Bob Chapek was CEO for less than three years before he was removed by the board, which brought Iger back. Chapek’s failure had several causes, but the central problem was treating the entire company as it treated the parks in its most cynical version: as a revenue optimization machine.
He raised prices, reduced benefits and alienated both the creative community and the public. This, however, went against the way the parks were supposed to function in Disney’s media ecosystem.
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Iger’s suit and the board deciding to try again with another parks executive suggests a real conviction that the experiences business will be the company’s center of gravity going forward.
With the saturation of AI-generated content on platforms, the theme park is once again offering something essential: the physical, immersive and irreplaceable experience of being in a place designed with care and intention.
It also indicates some confidence that D’Amaro, who most say is more attentive to the visitor experience than Chapek ever was, will not repeat his predecessor’s mistakes.
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Unlike Chapek, D’Amaro has a constant presence in the parks, is respected by fans and employees and invests time in direct contact to win the loyalty of these key audiences.
Disney has also committed to investing around $60 billion over the next decade to expand its parks, cruises and resorts, including a new destination in Abu Dhabi. This is a huge bet on physical experiences at a time when the digital side of entertainment is rapidly being commoditized.
The question is whether this investment will be guided by the philosophy that made the original Disneyland transformative — building proprietary technology in the service of irreplaceable experiences — or by the financialized logic that has dominated the parks in recent years, in which each interaction becomes an opportunity for monetization and each new area functions as an advertisement for a franchise.
In the 1950s, Walt Disney understood that Disneyland was the lifeline needed for Walt Disney Studios to survive the arrival of television. The company finds itself in a structurally similar position today.
D’Amaro will be judged not on his ability to manage theme parks, something he has clearly mastered, but on whether he can do what Walt did: use a moment of technological disruption to reinvent the meaning of the company.
Disney history offers you a model. Recent performance raises reasonable doubts about whether anyone at the company still knows how to follow it.
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