“Josh, can I get a quick one?”
It was the seventh time that Josh D’Amaro had been asked to pose for a photo as he wove his way through Disneyland. As in each previous instance — when the guy in a “Toy Story” shirt came running, when the teenagers near Sleeping Beauty Castle sandwiched him for a selfie — Mr. D’Amaro politely complied.
“A fast one,” he said. “I’ve got to keep walking.”
Just then, a woman wearing a fanny pack came to see what the commotion was about. “Oh, my God!” she shouted, as if she had just bumped into Walt Disney himself. “That’s the C.E.O.”
Not quite. Robert A. Iger, 74, is still the boss at Disney. Mr. D’Amaro runs the theme parks. But the Disneyland onlooker could well have been onto something.
Disney’s board is expected to choose Mr. Iger’s successor in the next week, according to two people with knowledge of the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private process. Succession has been hanging over the company since 2022, when Mr. Iger — having botched the process in 2020 — returned to do the whole exhausting dance again.
This time, there are two candidates: Dana Walden, 61, who reigns over Disney television (except ESPN) and has joint oversight of streaming, and Mr. D’Amaro, 54, who runs a division that includes theme parks, cruises and video games. The bake-off has been rigorous. Mr. Iger, for instance, has solicited feedback on Ms. Walden and Mr. D’Amaro from numerous executives who work directly under them, something he previously didn’t do.
Outside the company, the Disney succession question has narrowed even more.
“We view parks head Josh D’Amaro as the front-runner and investor favorite,” Steven Cahall, a Wells Fargo analyst, wrote in an recent report, saying out loud what other people on Wall Street have been whispering.
Mr. D’Amaro declined to be interviewed, and Disney declined to comment.
Mr. D’Amaro’s unit supplied roughly 60 percent of Disney’s profit last year. It accounts for 80 percent of what Disney is worth as a whole, according to MoffettNathanson, a research firm. Mr. D’Amaro oversees three of Disney’s four most important growth areas. (Cruises, games and parks. Streaming is the fourth.)
To put it bluntly: As Mr. D’Amaro’s division goes, so goes the company.
For someone who could be on the cusp of taking over the world’s largest entertainment conglomerate, Mr. D’Amaro has a strikingly low profile in Hollywood. Disney die-hards know him — Mr. D’Amaro has 169,000 followers on Instagram — but his name barely registers in movie and television circles, where he is often dismissively referred to as “the theme park guy.”
There is also a more delicate question: What are the chances that Mr. D’Amaro can pursue his own agenda in Disney’s top job without alienating the man who still looms over it? The last time Mr. Iger stepped back, he quickly soured on his successor, Bob Chapek. The epic power struggle that followed between Mr. Iger and Mr. Chapek destabilized the company and ended with Mr. Iger’s return to Disney.
Could Mr. D’Amaro pull off that balancing act while also contending with colossal industry upheaval, from the collapse of traditional TV to the rise of generative artificial intelligence?
‘The Theme Park Guy’
Mr. Iger has grandly compared running Disney to the presidency. “There is no job that really trains you” to lead the country, he said at a conference in 2023. “In many respects, that’s true at Disney, too. It’s a large, very complex company that’s in the public eye all the time.”
But Mr. D’Amaro’s background comes close.
He has spent his career as an executive, but he started out as a creative. He told the story at an event in 2024: After growing up outside Boston, he decided to become a sculptor and enrolled in an art program at Skidmore College in New York. At the end of his sophomore year, however, Mr. D’Amaro found himself welding a 12-foot sculpture at 2 a.m. while fretting about how he would ever support a family as an artist. He finished the piece, an abstract human figure reaching toward the sky, and transferred to Georgetown University to study marketing. (Skidmore displayed it on campus for years.)
After graduating, Mr. D’Amaro took a finance job at Gillette. But shaving products didn’t exactly light his fire. In 1998, he applied cold for a strategy job at Disney and got it. Before long, he was shepherding theme park marketing campaigns, moving to China to help revive a flailing Hong Kong Disneyland and, a few years later, working with James Cameron to add “Avatar”-themed rides to Walt Disney World in Florida.
In 2020, he became Disney’s top theme park executive, taking over during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Every second of every day, someone is being flung upside down on a Disney ride and carried across an ocean on a Disney cruise ship. Mr. D’Amaro’s portfolio includes 14 theme parks on three continents that attract an estimated 145 million visitors annually. He also oversees floating theme parks; Disney Cruise Line has eight ships in the water and five more on the way.
Still, reducing him to “the theme park guy” understates his reach.
He is a key hand in managing Disney’s complex relationship with China, where the company owns and operates two resorts with the government. Mr. D’Amaro is also on the front lines of Disney’s contentious expansion into the Middle East: The company’s first theme park in the region is under construction in Abu Dhabi. Disney has been criticized for going to a region where social and political norms clash with its stated values.
Technology is another focus.
Mr. D’Amaro has urged Disney ride developers to break ground in robotics, resulting in “Star Wars” droids that walk among crowds and use A.I. technology to emote, and a Spider-Man robot that can perform elaborate aerial tricks, just like a stunt person, 65 feet in the air. (The filmmaker Jon Favreau was so impressed with the droids that he cast them in his coming “Star Wars” movie.)
To speed up the time it takes to design new rides, Mr. D’Amaro authorized the creation of an internal A.I. system, called Jarvis, that aggregates 73 years of Disney blueprints into a single tool.
And it was Mr. D’Amaro, who also oversees Disney Consumer Products, who pushed Mr. Iger to invest billions of dollars in a video game platform. Disney and Epic Games, the company behind the Fortnite digital playground, are building a Fortnite-connected Disney universe. The goal is to supercharge Disney’s appeal among difficult-to-reach teenagers and 20-somethings.
‘Hello! I’m Josh’
As chairman of Disney Experiences, Mr. D’Amaro manages 185,000 employees. As Disney’s chief executive, he would initially need to manage one person above all others: Mr. Iger.
In 2020, when Mr. Iger stepped down as C.E.O. the first time, Mr. Chapek, his successor, took over “effective immediately.” Except that he didn’t, at least not really. Mr. Iger stayed on as creative director and executive chairman for another two years.
It quickly became clear that Mr. Iger and Mr. Chapek were opposites in both personality and approach. The dissimilarities contributed to a colossal falling-out. In 2022, with the company consumed by conflict, Disney’s board fired Mr. Chapek and rehired Mr. Iger. (His contract expires Dec. 31. Whether he will remain on Disney’s board after that is unclear.)
By contrast, Mr. Iger and Mr. D’Amaro are eerily similar.
After 19 years in total at Disney’s helm, Mr. Iger embodies the Disney brand — safe and wholesome, optimistic, “leading with empathy,” as Mr. Iger put it in his 2019 memoir.
Over his 28 years at the company, Mr. D’Amaro has honed a similar persona. Turn on a TV in one of the 23,000 hotel rooms at Disney World and Mr. D’Amaro appears with a welcome video (“Hello! I’m Josh”) that manages to be folksy without tipping into corny. On Instagram, Mr. D’Amaro grins as Disney roboticists unveil a walking and talking Olaf, the summer-obsessed snowman from “Frozen.”
Whether by emulation or coincidence, Mr. D’Amaro dresses like Mr. Iger (thin-knit sweaters over collared shirts), so much so that some people inside Disney roll their eyes behind his back. Mr. Iger and Mr. D’Amaro even share a birthday: Feb. 10.
The rapport between Mr. Iger and Mr. D’Amaro was on display in July when they appeared together at Disneyland’s 70th anniversary event in Anaheim, Calif. At one point, hundreds of Disney fans and employees gathered behind them for a photo.
“If you have a pair of ears this morning, put them on!” an announcer shouted, referring to Mickey Mouse hats. Mr. Iger, who has made a point of never being photographed in the gear (lest the images make him look silly), reached up and tugged on Mr. D’Amaro’s earlobe.
They both got the giggles.
‘It’s a Feeling’
Mr. D’Amaro likes to be liked, some people who have worked closely with him over the years have observed. It is said as a coded criticism: Running a company like Disney requires making hard calls that inevitably make people mad. Does he have the stomach?
While running Disney’s theme parks, Mr. D’Amaro has rankled visitors by raising (and raising) ticket prices. Citing widespread misuse of a policy that allowed disabled people and their families to skip long lines, Mr. D’Amaro narrowed eligibility, resulting in protests and a class-action lawsuit.
“I peeled a Josh D’Amaro fan club sticker off my laptop,” said Rebecca Davis, a Disney customer who has criticized the tightened system and pushed for changes.
But Mr. D’Amaro has never had to deal with anger in the Hollywood community. When a major star is unhappy, the situation can quickly escalate. Just ask Mr. Chapek, who found himself publicly sparring with Scarlett Johansson over the superhero film “Black Widow.”
Mr. D’Amaro’s lack of experience in movies is an obvious hole in his résumé. Disney’s holdings include Marvel, Pixar and 20th Century Studios. Can Mr. D’Amaro quickly make the right relationships in Hollywood’s creative community?
Also, will he move? Mr. D’Amaro is little known in Hollywood, in part because he doesn’t live on the entertainment-heavy Westside of Los Angeles. He resides with his wife, Susan, who was his high school sweetheart, in Coto de Caza, two hours to the south.
The answers are unknown.
When asked why they wanted to work at Disney, executives at the company often reach for a cloying personal anecdote — they grew up watching “The Little Mermaid” and vowed to someday, somehow be part of that world or some such. Mr. D’Amaro, however, tends to speak about how Disney affects others.
“Disney isn’t just a brand, it’s a feeling,” he said while standing near Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland’s 70th anniversary event. “It’s wonder and belonging and optimism. It’s memories that are handed down generation to generation.”
He paused to pick up a piece of stray confetti before adding, “Maintaining that connection — deepening it, hopefully — is why I’m proud to do what I do.”
Brooks Barnes is the chief Hollywood correspondent for The Times. He has reported on the entertainment industry for 25 years.
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