by Joe Tracy, editor of Theme Park Magazine
On the morning of March 18, 2026, Josh D’Amaro walked into the annual meeting of Walt Disney Company shareholders in Burbank, California, as the ninth chief executive in the company’s nearly 103-year history. He had spent 28 years working his way through almost every corner of Disney’s parks and experiences business: Disneyland, Hong Kong Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Adventures by Disney, Disney Consumer Products, and finally the entire global experiences segment. Now he was in charge of all of it. The parks, the ships, the studios, the streaming, ESPN, the Fortnite universe.
All of it.
It’s the kind of story that doesn’t happen very often in corporate America. The person who may know Disney’s business better than anyone alive now sits at the top of a company with $94.4 billion in annual revenue.
An Unusual Start
Josh D’Amaro was not always headed for a career in business. Born February 10, 1971, in Medfield, Massachusetts, a small suburb outside of Boston, D’Amaro grew up playing soccer and basketball with his father coaching the teams. By the time he reached college, his ambitions had turned to art. He enrolled at Skidmore College in New York with a clear plan: become a painter and sculptor.
That plan didn’t last long.
By his sophomore year, D’Amaro started running the math on what an artist’s life would actually look like. “In my head, I was going to be an artist — I was painting, sculpting and studying art with a bit of business on the side,” D’Amaro said at an April 2025 event at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, as quoted by The Hoya student newspaper. “I loved it, but I realized I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do when I got out.”
He transferred to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and graduated in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. Then he returned to Boston and took a job as a financial analyst at the Gillette Company, where he spent 5 years learning to read consumer behavior, track margins, and manage brand strategy in a fast-moving market. That kind of analytical training in a consumer goods company turned out to be better preparation for the theme park business than most people would expect.
In 1998, D’Amaro joined Disneyland Resort in Anaheim as a senior business planner.
He was 27 years old.
The Long Climb
D’Amaro’s first decade at Disney was spent jumping between finance, strategy, and marketing. He served as vice president of sales and travel trade marketing from 1998 to 2008, and during that stretch also worked as director of business planning and strategy development. One of the most important chapters of that period happened far from California. Disney sent him to Hong Kong to help manage sales and travel operations for Hong Kong Disneyland, which had opened in 2005 and was struggling to find its footing. Navigating the challenges of that property, including lower-than-expected attendance, cultural differences, and intense regional competition, gave him an international perspective that most U.S.-based executives never develop.
He returned to domestic operations in 2008, pivoting to chief financial officer of Disney Consumer Products Licensing, a role that expanded his view of how Disney’s intellectual property generates value far beyond the parks.
Then things started to really accelerate…
From 2010 onward, D’Amaro took on a new major role roughly every 1 to 3 years. Vice president of Adventures by Disney in 2010. Vice president of Disney’s Animal Kingdom starting in 2013, where he was in the room as the park broke ground on Pandora: The World of Avatar, a $1.2 billion expansion. Senior vice president of resort and transportation operations at Walt Disney World, starting in 2014. Chief commercial officer of Walt Disney World in 2017. Then president of Disneyland Resort in 2018.
That last one is where something significant happened.
The Apartment on Main Street
When D’Amaro took over as president of Disneyland in February 2018, he carried on a tradition passed down from one Disneyland chief to the next. He and his predecessor, Michael Colglazier, went up to the apartment Walt Disney himself had built above the firehouse on Main Street, U.S.A., cooked grilled cheese and chili on Walt’s old hot plate, and stepped out onto the patio to watch guests walk by below.
D’Amaro described the moment in a September 2024 keynote at the Inbound marketing conference in Boston. As quoted by the Hollywood Reporter, D’Amaro commented on the experience:
“We watched as guests strolled by on Main Street, we talked about what it means to make the place so special to millions of people, so special to the world. At that moment, I must admit that I felt aware of the responsibility that I was taking on, because Disney fans, they take their fandom very, very seriously.”
He oversaw the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in May 2019, a 14-acre, billion-dollar land that fundamentally changed what a theme park could be. A year later, he moved to Walt Disney World as its president. And then, in May 2020, everything changed again.
The Worst Timing Imaginable
On May 18, 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic that had shut down every Disney park on Earth, D’Amaro was named chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, later rebranded as Disney Experiences. He inherited a segment generating essentially zero revenue. Every park was closed.
By September 29, 2020, he was forced to announce the layoff of 28,000 cast members. It was one of the hardest decisions in the company’s history. He issued a public letter calling the move “heartbreaking,” and directly called out the State of California for its refusal to allow Disneyland to reopen, describing that extended closure as a factor that “exacerbated” an already devastating situation. People who were there during that period have described D’Amaro as someone who absorbed the human weight of that decision rather than hiding behind it.
The parks gradually reopened through 2020 and 2021. When Disneyland finally reopened in April 2021, it was the last Disney resort in the world to do so.
Building the Machine
Once the parks were running again, D’Amaro set about a financial transformation that reshaped how Disney makes money from its physical properties.
The biggest and most controversial change was the retirement of the complimentary FastPass+ system in August 2021. In its place came the paid Disney Genie+ service, later renamed Lightning Lane Multi Pass, plus a separate, higher-cost option for individual premium attractions. Fans pushed back hard. Many had viewed line-skipping as something included with a park ticket. The paid system was widely criticized as adding complexity to an already expensive vacation.
But the financial results were difficult to argue with. By fiscal year 2025, the Disney Experiences segment had grown to $36 billion in annual revenue, with operating income in the range of $9 to $10 billion. This made Experiences the single largest revenue driver at The Walt Disney Company, bigger than its studios and bigger than its streaming business.
D’Amaro also committed Disney to a $60 billion, ten-year capital investment plan across its parks and cruise line, the largest in the company’s history. New lands, new ships, new technology. The Disney Cruise Line grew to nine ships by 2026. Fantasy Springs opened at Tokyo DisneySea. A new park is in development in Abu Dhabi. Expansions at Magic Kingdom and Disney’s Animal Kingdom are underway.
Not everything went smoothly. A plan to relocate more than 2,000 California-based Disney employees, including much of Walt Disney Imagineering, to a new $1 billion campus near Orlando’s airport became a flashpoint. Imagineers didn’t want to go, and Disney simultaneously found itself in a bitter political fight with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In May 2023, D’Amaro canceled the relocation, citing “changing business conditions” and “new leadership.”
The episode cost the company some talent and a lot of goodwill.
He also oversaw a controversial overhaul of the Disability Access Service program, tightening eligibility criteria to address widespread abuse of the system. The changes drew criticism from disability advocates who said the new screening process was more like an interrogation than a conversation. The issue reached the 2026 shareholder meeting, where a proposal demanding an independent review of the program was put to a vote. The proposal did not pass, but the attention it received made clear the issue hasn’t gone away.
The Technology Vision
D’Amaro’s time leading Disney Experiences was not just about financial engineering. He became one of the company’s most visible champions of technology as a storytelling tool.
The BDX Droids that roam Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge are one example. These autonomous, free-roaming robots are designed to feel like they actually live in the Star Wars universe, reacting to guests with distinct personalities. D’Amaro brought them to events well beyond the parks, from the D23 fan convention to the South by Southwest festival in Austin to a Nvidia keynote. The droids will appear in The Mandalorian and Grogu, making the jump from theme park to film franchise.
He also championed the partnership with Epic Games, the studio behind Fortnite, to create a persistent Disney-branded universe within that platform. The deal represents a fundamental shift in how Disney thinks about reaching its audience, moving beyond physical parks and traditional screens into an interactive digital space.
“These are relatable characters, and they’re created by courageous innovators that help us believe in the story that we’re talking about,” D’Amaro said of the BDX Droids at the Inbound conference in Boston, as quoted by The Hollywood Reporter.
Kevin Mayer, who worked closely with D’Amaro at Disney and now serves as co-CEO at Candle Media, described his approach to The Hollywood Reporter this way:
“He’s also a very savvy business person, he is exceptionally quantitative in his approach to business and he really can run the numbers. He’s detailed, he has a very keen eye on the bottom line, and he’s pretty strategic, too.”
The Moment He Found Out
On February 2, 2026, Bob Iger and Disney board chairman James Gorman called D’Amaro into a room and told him he would be the next CEO of The Walt Disney Company.
D’Amaro described the moment at a Disney town hall the following day. As reported by Variety, he said:
“To be invited into a room two days ago and have Bob and James Gorman on the other side of the door asking me to be CEO, it’s surreal. A lot goes through your head in that moment. I got a little embarrassed. I got a little choked up when they let me know, because it’s a big responsibility.”
The announcement was made publicly on February 3, 2026. D’Amaro would succeed Bob Iger effective at the annual shareholders meeting on March 18, 2026. Dana Walden, previously co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, was simultaneously named president and chief creative officer, a newly created role reporting directly to D’Amaro. Thomas Mazloum was named to D’Amaro’s former position as chairman of Disney Experiences.
(photo by Joe Tracy for ©Theme Park Magazine)
The Question Everyone Is Asking
The Walt Disney Company has two very different audiences watching D’Amaro closely right now.
One is Wall Street. The other is the Disney guest.
These groups usually do not want the same thing.
Shareholders benefit from higher per-capita spending, dynamic pricing, and the systematic conversion of free amenities into paid revenue streams. Guests benefit from a vacation that feels worth what they paid, with enough room to breathe and enough magic to justify the trip.
Under D’Amaro’s leadership of Disney Experiences, both audiences experienced moments of satisfaction and frustration. The financial results were exceptional. Guest pricing became a consistent sore point. The middle-class family that once planned a Disney trip every few years increasingly found itself squeezed by the combined weight of ticket prices, Lightning Lane fees, resort hotel costs, and the loss of perks that had once been included.
The early signals from D’Amaro’s first day as CEO suggest he is aware of this tension.
At the March 18 shareholders meeting, he did not announce a reversal of Lightning Lane pricing or any specific rollback of the policies that drove revenue growth. But the language he used was instructive.
“We will capitalize on our strengths by focusing on coming together as one Disney to deliver a more connected, personalized, and immersive experience to our consumers — wherever they are, and whenever they would like to engage with us.”
He also invoked one of Walt Disney’s most quoted lines, the one displayed on the casting agency door on Main Street at Disneyland:
“It takes people to make the dream a reality.”
He used it to underscore his belief that technology should serve creativity, not replace it. “We’ll continue to develop and embrace new technologies to empower our storytellers — but never at the expense of our characters and worlds, our creative partners, or the trust people place in us.”
He also directly addressed pricing at the shareholder meeting, though critically and not in a way that promised reductions. According to reporting by WDWMagic, he tied variable pricing and crowd control measures to internal guest satisfaction scores, arguing that a better-distributed crowd leads to a better experience. That framing stops well short of an apology, but it does suggest he wants guests to feel the pricing is connected to something meaningful, not purely to revenue extraction.
There is also D’Amaro’s well-documented habit of walking the parks without an entourage, talking to guests and cast members, taking selfies, showing up on Christmas Day to see how operations actually run. Marcus Buckingham, a leadership expert who shadowed him for a book project, was quoted in Variety saying that D’Amaro “is constantly accosted by guests who want to hug him and take pictures with him” at Disneyland, and that this level of spontaneous recognition “has never happened before” with other Disney executives he had observed.
That kind of visibility matters. So does his relationship with Disney’s creative community. According to The Hollywood Reporter, D’Amaro has active working relationships with filmmakers and creative leaders across the company, including Marvel’s Kevin Feige, Pixar’s Pete Docter, and Frozen director Jennifer Lee. “These people are my friends,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. That closeness to the creative side is one of the qualities that distinguished him from his predecessor, Bob Chapek, whose tenure ended in part because of a perceived distance from the people who make Disney’s content.
What Comes Next
D’Amaro takes over a company that is larger, more complicated, and more global than at almost any point in its history. He will need to manage an entertainment streaming business still competing for attention in a crowded market, an ESPN brand navigating the shift from cable to direct-to-consumer, and a parks business that is simultaneously expanding and being challenged to prove it can remain accessible.
The road to get here was long and, at times, genuinely hard. A small-town Massachusetts kid who once wanted to be a sculptor ended up spending 28 years building some of the most elaborate, technologically advanced, story-driven experiences in the history of entertainment. He laid off tens of thousands of people at the worst moment in the industry’s history, then rebuilt the business into the company’s most profitable segment. He made decisions that cost him fan goodwill and decisions that earned it back.
Now he runs the whole thing.
All of it.
—
Note: There is debate over whether D’Amaro is the 8th or 9th CEO of the Walt Disney Company. Bob Iger served two separate terms, so we count him twice, thus making D’Amaro the ninth CEO.
Editor’s Note
Theme Park Magazine welcomes Josh D’Amaro as the new CEO of The Walt Disney Company. He takes on the role at a fascinating moment, one where the company has never been more financially powerful and, for some fans, never felt further from its roots. D’Amaro has shown throughout his career that he genuinely loves what Disney is supposed to be. Now he has the authority to protect it. Walt Disney built something that was never just about profit. It was about making people feel something extraordinary. We hope the new CEO carries that with him into every decision, big and small, and that the guest experience always has a seat at the table alongside the balance sheet. The best version of Disney is one where those two things are not in conflict. D’Amaro seems to understand that. We’re rooting for him.
Explore More: Videos
Dream To Reality How A Disney Story Comes To Life With Josh D’Amaro | INBOUND 2024
The Future of World-Building at Disney | SXSW LIVE
Disney CEO Bob Iger, Josh D’Amaro & More Executives Get Interrogated By Stormtroopers at Disneyland!
Explore More: Resources
- Article: From Main Street to the Castle: Josh D’Amaro’s Journey to Disney CEO (Theme Park Magazine)
- Article: Disney’s Next CEO: Five Things to Know About Josh D’Amaro (Variety)
- Article: Inside Josh D’Amaro’s Rise at Disney: How a Theme Park Veteran Became CEO (The Hollywood Reporter)
- Bio: Josh D’Amaro – The Walt Disney Company (Walt Disney Company)
Feature image by Joe Tracy for ©Theme Park Magazine (Josh D’Amaro superimposed)
Your Support Makes Theme Park Magazine Possible
Love our independent, ad-free theme park coverage? We’re passionate about bringing you these stories without the usual ad clutter, and it’s only possible thanks to supporters like you.
Your contribution directly funds more in-depth articles, stunning visuals, and keeps our focus purely on the magic. Please donate via PayPal today to help us continue this mission. – Joe Tracy, Editor
