If there was a moment in Josh D’Amaro’s nearly 30-year career at The Walt Disney Co. that underscores the unique role the entertainment giant has in the hearts of people around the world, it would probably be the day he took over as president of Disneyland in February of 2018. 

Above the firehouse on Main Street, USA, Walt Disney himself had an apartment built so he had a place to stay when was at the park, and D’Amaro joined his predecessor Michael Colglazier in the space, to carry on a tradition that one Disneyland chief passes on to the next: Using Walt Disney’s own hot plate, they cooked grilled cheese and chili, before stepping onto the patio. 

“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,” D’Amaro recalled, speaking to the Inbound marketing conference in Boston in Sept. 2024. “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.” 

D’Amaro, of course, was named the next CEO of Disney on Feb. 3, and he will now be responsible for serving that fandom not just at Disneyland in Anaheim, but around the world, not just in theme parks and on cruise ships, but in movie theaters and on Disney+, on ESPN and, soon enough, inside Fortnite and OpenAI’s Sora. 

The veteran executive, who has worked on the company’s theme parks, experiences and consumer products for the past three decades or so, will now have the weight of the entertainment business on his shoulders.  

According to people who have worked with D’Amaro, and who know him personally, he possesses two particular skills that should come in handy when he officially takes the reins next month: A sincere admiration for creativity, and a business executive’s grasp of the strategies, spreadsheets and numbers that make global companies tick.  

“He has exceptionally high EQ [emotional intelligence], kind of like Bob Iger, frankly, and he loves and understands and is deeply committed to the Disney brand,” says Kevin Mayer, the Candle Media co-CEO, who worked closely with D’Amaro at Disney. “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.” 

“Josh always had a creative streak to him. He was someone who would make me laugh. We worked on school projects together,” says Kevin Foley, the global head of capital markets at JPMorgan, who was a childhood friend of D’Amaro. “He got along well with people and had the ability to be both a team player and leader. He connected well with everyone and people would gravitate toward him.” 

D’Amaro grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts, a short drive outside of Boston. An avid athlete, he grew up playing basketball and soccer (his dad coached the teams). “It’s a small town, a tight knit community and very value oriented, with a focus on doing the right thing and working hard,” Foley recalls. “We were taught to take our academics seriously, treat people respectfully and good things would happen.” 

He now lives in Orange County with his wife and kids, though Disney noted in an SEC filing that he is eligible for a relocation benefit, which suggests he could end up moving closer to the company’s Burbank headquarters. For the next fiscal year, D’Amaro is set to receive a pay package of about $38 million. 

A graduate of Georgetown University, he started his professional career in Boston as a financial analyst for Gillette, before joining Disneyland in a strategy role in 1998. Over the next three decades he would rise through the ranks, at Disneyland, Hong Kong Disneyland and Walt Disney World, ultimately taking over Disney’s experiences division in May of 2020, a few months after Bob Chapek was named CEO of the company.

Disney, however, is still grappling with the fallout of that succession process, and there is little doubt that it heavily influenced how Disney approached this one.  

Chapek, like D’Amaro, was the leader of Disney’s experiences business before being elevated to succeed CEO Bob Iger. Iger, of course, stuck around as executive chairman, taking a hands-on role with the company’s creative output.  

But Chapek, sources said at the time, alienated members of Disney’s creative teams, particular in its animation units, which saw their films shift toward streaming-first releases as Chapek reorganized the company around a central operating structure called DMED. Some in the company felt that Chapek was elevating the MBAs over the people actually creating the characters and worlds that Disney was best known for. 

On June 23, 2021, Disney’s board of directors, including Iger and Chapek, gathered at Disney’s Aulani resort in Hawaii for one of its retreats. The structure Chapek created was a topic of discussion, as was Disney’s five-year plan for creative content. 

Iger opened the meeting with a passionate defense of creativity, in what some perceived to be a slight at Chapek’s expense. “In a world and business that is awash with data, it is tempting to use data to answer all of our questions, including creative questions,” he said. “I urge all of you not to do that.” 

Aware of the resentment fomenting in Disney’s creative divisions, Chapek sent a memo to staff on Jan, 10, 2022, announcing “a new standing monthly meeting with our senior creative leaders to discuss the opportunities we face as a storytelling enterprise,” but it was too little too late.

Less than a year later, Iger returned as CEO, and Chapek was shown the door. 

“When I came back three years ago, I had a tremendous amount that needed fixing,” Iger lamented in a call with Wall Street analysts Feb. 2. “I’m not going to speak for my successor in terms of how the company will be organized, but I do believe strongly that it’s very important that any organization that’s created is created with an eye toward creating and maintaining accountability.” 

When Hollywood insiders dismissed D’Amaro’s chances early on in the process, it was the legacy of the disenfranchised creatives that sparked that concern. 

But D’Amaro, according to people who have worked with him, is no Chapek. And this succession process was handled in a very different way than the last one, with a board led by James Gorman firmly running the show. 

For starters, D’Amaro is said to be enamored and excited by the creative process, and he is a genuine admirer of much of its work, from Star Wars and Marvel to ESPN and animation.

“I think we start with the fact that there is no other company in the world that has such a treasure trove of stories to tell,” D’Amaro told The Hollywood Reporter, sitting in a green room at the Boston Convention Center, shortly after he delivered his keynote presentation at the Inbound conference. “We’re incredibly fortunate in that regard.” 
 
D’Amaro, sources say, has a strong working relationship with many of Disney’s top creatives, from Dave Filoni, who was recently named president of Lucasfilm, to Marvel’s Kevin Feige, to Disney animation chief Jared Bush to Pixar’s Pete Docter, from meetings where they discuss how to bring their characters to life in the parks, to text chains talking about the state of the industry. 
 
“These people are my friends. [Frozen director] Jennifer Lee is my friend, Kevin Feige is my friend, we know one another, and we’re spending a lot of time together,” D’Amaro told me. “And when I say we’re spending a lot of time together, when Kevin Feige is thinking about his next Marvel movie. I’m there. My team is there right from the beginning, thinking about these worlds that he’s going to create, these characters that are going to come to life, what weapons they might have. And we’re thinking about, how are we going to translate this story beyond the screen into a theme park, onto an attraction, to a consumer product, on a game.”

And while the Chapek transition alienated some senior Disney leadership, D’Amaro and Gorman seem committed to keeping a level of stability in the C-suite. Essentially every top executive has inked a new deal to stay with the company, and that includes Dana Walden, who was the other leading internal CEO candidate, who will oversee the company’s creative output as CCO (both D’Amaro and Walden also received significant pay bumps in connection with the promotions).
 
“She is an incredibly powerful executive,” D’Amaro told ABC World News Tuesday. “She’s got years and years of experience in this space. She’s exceptionally creative and she’s a great human being. And I think it’s absolutely the right step to continue to push us into this next frontier.” 
 
Of course, it isn’t always so simple. 
 
“That’s always a very delicate situation. You know, two people are vying for same spot, and someone leaves. I did,” Mayer recalls. “I left when Bob Chapek got the job, I know what it’s like. I think he’ll be better than Chapek was at keeping other senior executives engaged, focused and happy, and he’ll be very good at that.” 
 
“If you’re so fortunate to have world class executives, you always want to keep them, for the good of the company, for the good of the CEO, for everything,” Gorman says. “Now, it’s not always easy to do, and obviously, personalities, ambitions, all that stuff comes into play. People are human … but I’m very proud of the way everybody’s behaved and their professionalism, and I’m excited for the future.” 

The thing about D’Amaro is that he appreciates the creativity, but understands the nitty-gritty, with a healthy dose of technological thinking as well. It’s a big part of why Iger committed $60 billion to invest in the experiences business over the coming years.
 
During his tenure, he worked to turn Disney’s parks, experiences and its legendary Imagineering team into storytelling machines themselves, often turning to cutting edge tech to do so. 
 
While Disney’s parks have inspired franchises for years (see Pirates of the Caribbean and Jungle Cruise), D’Amaro and his Imagineers turned that on its head, taking arguably the most-established IP in the portfolio, Star Wars, and bringing something new to it. 
 
The Imagineers created a new type of animatronic robot, called BDX droids, with big personalities and an ability to emote, while feeling like they just belong in the world of Star Wars. While they initially roamed the Star Wars lands in Anaheim and Orlando, D’Amaro would bring them around the world, from D23 to the Boston Convention Center, from SXSW to a Nvidia keynote. 
 
“These guys, I feel like they’re alive. They’ve got great personalities,” D’Amaro told the crowd in Boston as the droids marched on stage. “These are relatable characters, and they’re created by courageous innovators that help us believe in the story that we’re talking about.” 
 
Later that evening, the BDX droids were spotted winding their way through an Italian restaurant in Boston’s seaport district, as diners took out their phones to snap pics and take videos. 

The droids are shining (and shiny) example of creativity and storytelling, brought to life through technology, and in a few months they will make their big screen debut in The Mandalorian and Grogu, as characters originally created for one of Disney’s theme parks make their way into one of the biggest film franchises of all time. 
 
And it was D’Amaro who championed Disney’s partnership with Epic Games, which will see the two companies launch an interactive new universe in the not-too-distant future. 
 
“Josh D’Amaro is a great leader and a genuinely nice guy too. We’ve worked with Josh and the team closely on our Fortnite collaborations and now on our bigger plans to build an open game and entertainment universe together,” Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, told THR in a text message. “The company is in good hands.” 
 
D’Amaro is something of a Walt Disney historian, and a conversation with him about the latest project he’s working on will often turn to something that Disney himself pursued back in the day. 
 
He is fond of pulling up Disney’s legendary 1957 strategy chart (in many ways the inspiration for the modern corporate flywheel), with Disney’s theatrical film studio at the center, and music, TV, Disneyland, books and consumer products flowing around it. 
 
“He had storytelling and content in the middle, and all of these other businesses surrounding it, such that we could stay with the consumer, wherever they were, literally in the world,” D’Amaro told THR from Austin, Texas last year, as he was preparing to deliver a keynote at SXSW. 
 
When D’Amaro talks about the future of Disney, he often looks back to its past for inspiration, citing the “courage” and “risk-taking” of Walt Disney himself. 
 
Before taking the stage at SXSW, he expounded about Walt’s desire to seek out the best technology to bring his characters to life. 
 
That includes using technology to bring back Walt Disney himself. In connection with Disneyland’s 70^th anniversary, the company created an audio-animatronic of the company’s founder, turning it into an attraction for visitors to see. 

“We wanted to make sure that all generations new and older had a chance to get to know Walt, to understand him, to celebrate him, his life and his legacy,” D’Amaro told THR ahead of the animatronic’s debut. “Walt had always talked about innovating and pushing the envelope of technology, and that’s continued up until today with our Imagineers. And the Imagineers and I believed that we were at the point where we could bring Walt to life for fans, again, both older and new, to tell his story, that the technology had matched the moment.” 
 
And that’s the other obsession D’Amaro has, one that may be particularly well-suited to arguably the most important job in entertainment: A sincere concern for what the Disney fans want. After all, he was once just a fan himself. 
 
In the Anaheim Convention Center in Aug. 2024, D’Amaro walked me through the Imagineering pavilion that his team created for the company’s D23 fan event. The BDX droids were there, as were next-gen animatronics of characters like Elsa from Frozen. The Imagineers constructed a Holotile floor for demos. 

The next evening, D’Amaro was set to deliver the Experiences keynote address, where he would be joined by creative leaders like Feige, Docter and Lee, as well as talent like Billy Crystal and Ke Huy Quan.

Standing in front of the Holotile floor, D’Amaro expressed a desire to meet the expectations of the 12,000 or so Disney fans that were set to fill the Honda Center for his presentation. 

“These are the true Disney fans. They have a history with us. They have memories of their families being here. They have a passion for our stories and a passion for our cast members,” D’Amaro emphasized, adding that those fans will spread the word about what his team was doing. “There is no better place in the world to share stories about where you’re heading in the future.”

It’s that two-way feedback that may come in handy in a world of entertainment that has never been more disrupted, with more options than ever before. Even for a company as big and impactful as Disney sometimes needs to take a cue from its most loyal customers. 

“What Josh is pretty amazing at is he’s so deep into the business, and he understands all the details of the business,” says Rick Rieder, the chief investment officer of Global Fixed Income for BlackRock, who has known D’Amaro for years. “He’s got incredible passion around a business that requires passion, and is actually driven by passion. And he’s got a lot of energy to succeed.”

D’Amaro’s energy was apparent to those fans too, as he made a habit of walking the parks, talking to visitors, taking selfies, and just understanding what they wanted. 

“One of the things that’s very important to me is we listen,” D’Amaro said to me, sitting in the convention center green room in Boston, reflecting on what he said on stage a few minutes earlier. “Our fans have points of view, they have things they want to see come to life.” 

Now D’Amaro will be in a position to deliver on those dreams.