New Disney CEO Should Quit as Fast as Possible

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 2, 9:15AM EST

24/7 Wall St. Key Points

The best thing Walt Disney Co.’s (NYSE: DIS) new CEO can do is put the company on the market as soon as possible.
On-again, off-again CEO Bob Iger has shown that Disney cannot be fixed.
The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 stocks and Disney wasn't one of them. Get them here FREE.

New Disney CEO Should Quit as Fast as Possible — © Josh Hallett / Wikimedia Commons

Media reports say Josh D’Amaro, the head of Walt Disney Co.’s (NYSE: DIS | DIS Price Prediction) theme park operation, will replace on-again off-again CEO Bob Iger, who has effectively run the company into the ground. The best thing D’Amaro can do in the current period of media mergers is put Disney on the market and hope that the Ellisons will buy it as part of their rush to control the entire sector.

Iger, who was supposed to be a magician, ran Disney during some of its best days. From 2005 to 2029, he went on an M&A tear. He added Pixar, Marvel, LucasFilm, and part of 21st Century Fox. He also started Disney+ in November 2019. It grew, but the growth cost the company dearly. The streamer has made a little money recently, but it sits well behind industry leaders Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube.

Over the past five years, Disney stock has collapsed 35% as the S&P 500 has risen 79%. Over the last year, Disney’s stock is flat while the market is up 15%.

While D’Amaro cannot fix Disney, he was the only person who posted results that made him a reasonable candidate. As Bloomberg reported, “D’Amaro, 54, has led the unit that delivers most of Disney’s profits since 2020.” Although the rising price of theme park admission has caused investor anxiety, short of a recession, the growth is unlikely to be curtailed.

The best way to describe Disney’s recent financial performance is flat. In the most recent quarter, revenue was up 3% to $22.5 billion. Total segment operating income, which adds Disney’s unit performance together, dropped 5% to $3.48 billion. Experiences, the part of Disney run by D’Amaro, posted operating income of $1.88 billion, up 13%. It is also 55% of the segment operating total.

Unfixable

The board of directors must believe that D’Amaro can fix what Iger broke. The board brought back Iger in November 2022 to clean up earlier problems.

D’Amaro would need to fix Disney’s film business, which has had choppy performance since Iger returned. He would also need to fix its streaming business in a sector that has become increasingly competitive. And Disney’s media sector is part of a world that is disappearing

If D’Amaro puts Disney on the block, it would be as individual assets, and he could hope to receive the kind of “merger” that Paramount got with Sundance Media. Better yet, he could start a bidding war similar to the one that currently involves Warner Bros. Discovery.

Disney cannot be fixed, as Iger has shown. There is no reason to think one of his lieutenants can do any better.

Walt Disney Stock Price Prediction and Forecast 2026-2030

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.