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When activist investor Nelson Peltz made his second bid for a seat on the board of the Walt Disney Company, he had a laundry list of complaints. But his complaints weren’t different from those everyone has heard since Disney CEO Bob Iger returned in late 2022.
Disney has been struggling at the box office with several high-priced flops, Disney Plus has not been able to maintain profitability, Iger cut the company’s dividend, and theme park attendance has been inconsistent. But Peltz’s biggest complaint is the one that Iger has yet to address: who will succeed him as the CEO of the Walt Disney Company?
Credit: Disney; Thomas Hawk, Flickr
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The internal candidates are the Chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products, Josh D’Amaro, and the Co-Chairman of Disney Entertainment, Dana Walden. Iger also brought back Tom Staggs and Kevin Mayer, the CEOs of Candle Media, to help with Disney Plus and Disney’s linear channels. move over to streaming.
But none of those internal candidates have the expertise in all aspects of Disney’s businesses to eventually take over as CEO. Fortune Magazine spoke with several experts who said Iger’s successor is not currently with the company.
Kevin Mayer, Bob Iger, and Tom Staggs. Credit: Disney
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Julio Bruno, ex-CEO at Time Out, who helped take the company public, told Fortune:
I can’t even imagine managing a company like Disney that has so many different entities. You have to know about theme parks, retail, streaming, the subscription business, terrestrial TV, news…. It’s going to be very difficult to find somebody who can capture two-thirds of that spectrum. I have a feeling that it will be somebody much more looking at the future of streaming, purely digital. Media has changed so dramatically in the last 20 years, but particularly the last five–with artificial intelligence and what is happening with the strikes. You need somebody who understands this new world.
The issue facing the internal candidates is that none have experience working throughout the Walt Disney Company. D’Amaro has lead parks but not film/streaming; the exact opposite is true for Walden, Staggs, and Mayer.
But, if not an internal candidate, then who will lead the Walt Disney Company in 2026 when Bob Iger’s contract is up? It’s hard to say if that person exists, but none of the experts Fortune interviewed had an idea of who that person would be.
Credit: Disney
But they all knew that Iger would work hard to protect what he built. Bruno said:
What do you have left when you are a consumed multimillionaire CEO like Iger with friends all over the world? The only thing you’ll want to preserve is your legacy.
We will continue to update this story at Disney Fanatic.
