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Can Disney’s Josh and Dana Honeymoon Last?

After a year-plus contest for the C.E.O. gig ended with a D’Amaro victory and a pretty good consolation prize for Walden, the highly choreographed vibes have been only positive. But conflicting styles and potentially existential challenges in Walden’s expanded film and TV fiefdom could soon capsize the boat.

Josh D'Amaro
Friction has been mostly missing from the glowing media coverage of the handoff from Bob Iger to Josh D’Amaro, pictured, the theme parks veteran who was working in “resort and transportation operations” at Disney World a decade ago and will now oversee more than 200,000 employees and nearly $200 billion in market value Photo: Ricardo Moreira/Getty Images for Disney
Matthew Belloni
February 6, 2026

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Josh D’Amaro, the newly crowned C.E.O. of The Walt Disney Co., is 100 percent a brand guy. Lives, breathes, and probably dreams inappropriate dreams about the big, beautiful Disney brand. Dana Walden, D’Amaro’s board-appointed president and chief creative officer, is as much not a Disney brand person as has ever been allowed to reach the almost-top of the company. Walden’s a career general-interest TV executive, mostly for Rupert Murdoch’s boundary-pushing Fox studio, whose greatest successes—Modern Family, 24, Family Guy, American Horror Story and the Ryan Murphy oeuvre—do not fit neatly into Walt’s famous 1957 “strategy map” that D’Amaro is said to worship like a bible. So… how’s this going to work?