Dana Walden Expands Oversight To Film In New Role As Media Glass Ceiling Remains Intact

In March 2014, Disney/ABC TV Group President Anne Sweeney left Disney as the company was nearing a decision on who would replace Bob Iger as CEO. While she was not among the finalists for the job, at the time, Sweeney was the closest a woman had ever gotten to the CEO job at Disney.

Twelve years later, Dana Walden, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, came a lot closer as one of the two main contenders to succeed Iger in the top job alongside Disney Parks & Experiences chief Josh D’Amaro. Ultimately, the outcome was the same, with D’Amaro named Disney CEO this morning, and the glass ceiling for a woman becoming CEO of a major media company remains unbroken.

In a Solomonic decision allowing Disney to keep two strong executives with different areas of expertise – something very rare in the aftermath of a CEO bakeoff – Walden was named President and Chief Creative Officer, creating a new position for her, in which she will oversee Disney Entertainment — both film and TV — as well as Hulu, Disney+ and TWDC Marketing, reporting to D’Amaro. Fellow Disney Entertainment co-chairman Alan Bergman will now report to Walden; ESPN remains a standalone unit run by Jimmy Pitaro who will report to D’Amaro.

Walden still follows in Iger’s footsteps as a Disney TV executive who went on to run both film and television.

Last fall, Iger reportedly quizzed Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos about the effectiveness of Netflix’s co-CEO structure, raising speculation that Disney was mulling a similar setup with D’Amaro and Walden.

While that idea was abandoned, the company still took a page out of Netflix’s playbook with a Chief Creative Officer role across film and TV, giving Walden a new area to play in and keeping her – and her talent relationships with top creators such as Ryan Murphy – in the fold.

While parks, experiences and games – the three areas D’Amaro had been overseeing – are considered key to Disney’s growth, Disney is still an entertainment company, and Walden provides the Hollywood standing D’Amaro is currently lacking.

“We’re so blessed at this company. We had four incredible top executives with Jimmy Pitaro and Alan Bergman, Dana and Josh,” James Gorman, the chair of Disney’s board, told CNBC this morning, listing the four top executives under Iger who had been considered his potential successors until the field narrowed down to D’Amaro and Walden.

Calling Walden “unbelievable executive,” Gorman said, “If you think about what is the heart of the Disney company, it’s the creativity. It’s this amazing IP that’s been produced over decades, going back to Walt, and the storytelling that comes from that creativity. And I think Dana, working with Josh and ensuring that the best creativity permeates all of our businesses, is what we wanted.”

Just yesterday, Iger spoke of Disney’s own heated rivalry – or as he put it “healthy competition” – between parks and entertainment “in terms of which of those two businesses is going to essentially prevail as the number one driver of profitability,” saying that he is confident that “both have the ability to grow nicely into the future.”

They will now be able to grow – at least for now – with the leaders who got them to this point.

A former top executive at Fox – where she did hold a CEO title within the Fox Television Group – Walden joined Disney following the 2019 acquisition, starting off with a portfolio that included ABC and the Disney Television Studios. She subsequently rose to co-chairman of Disney Entertainment where she was responsible for the P&L for all entertainment media, news and content businesses globally, direct-to-consumer, technology, advertising, platform distribution, and international content and operations.

Inheriting a DTC business after the botched DMED reorg under CEO Bob Chapek that had lost billions, she and Bergman helped turn it into an earnings report standout.

Walden faced a lot more obstacles in the public bakeoff than D’Amaro as she had to navigate the bruising, lengthy YouTube TV blackout of Disney channels and the temporary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! over comments Kimmel had made following Charlie Kirk’s murder. In handling the latter, she picked up Kimmel’s endorsement for the CEO job.

There was also the $15M ABC News payment to Donald Trump to settle a lawsuit over a comment by George Stephanopoulos.

Walden also has had her hands full doing a Disney streaming technology upgrade. Hulu has been operating on an old tech platform from before Disney took over the former joint venture that was plagued with glitches during the live Oscar telecast last year.

Hulu has not been able to launch a massive scripted hit of the size of Stranger Things or The Summer I Turned Pretty or Ted Lasso but it has found a massive unscripted one in The Secret Lives of Mormon Lives while fielding crowd pleasers such as Only Murders In the Building. The streamer also has been boosted by the output of FX and ABC — homes of breakouts such as Shōgun and High Potential — as building an integrated entertainment ecosystem of Disney’s linear and streaming businesses has been a priority for Walden.

Over her decades at Disney and Fox, she also has shepherded such hit shows as 24, 9-1-1, Abbott Elementary, American Horror Story, American Idol, The Bear, Bluey, Bob’s Burgers, Dancing With the Stars, Family Guy, Glee, Grey’s Anatomy, The Handmaid’s Tale, Homeland, The Kardashians, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Spidey and his Amazing Friends, The Simpsons and This Is Us.

When Sweeney stepped down in 2014, she said she was leaving for a career change to TV directing, something she never really followed through on. While Walden would not discuss the CEO search when asked about it over the past year, she would quip that regardless of the outcome, you would not see her announce that she would be becoming a TV director.

In her new role at Disney, Walden will continue to work with TV directors — and now she will collaborate with film directors too.