The Walt Disney Company

• 1. Introduction

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  The Walt Disney Company began not as an empire but as a $1,500 contract. In 1923, a young animator named Walt Disney signed a deal with New York film distributor Margaret J. Winkler to produce six series of short films called Alice Comedies. He and his brother Roy had just co-founded Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Los Angeles, built partly on the ruins of their previous venture, Laugh-O-Gram Studio, which had gone bankrupt that same year in Kansas City. That modest arrangement with Winkler set in motion a century-long story involving synchronized sound, animated feature films, theme parks on multiple continents, hockey teams, baseball teams, cruise lines, and streaming platforms reaching over 190 countries. How did a small animation outfit founded on a shoestring contract become the company that would, in 2019, be described as "an entertainment colossus the size of which the world has never seen"? The answers lie in a series of bets, some brilliant, some ruinous, and in the decisions of the people who placed them.

• 2. Mickey and the Sound Revolution

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  Steamboat Willie, released in 1928, was the studio's third short film featuring Mickey Mouse, and it changed everything. Produced using synchronized sound through Powers' Cinephone system, which relied on Lee de Forest's Phonofilm technology, it became the first post-produced sound cartoon. Pat Powers' company distributed it, and audiences responded immediately. The two earlier Mickey Mouse shorts, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho, had debuted in test screenings in May 1928 without sound; both were re-released with synchronized audio the following year. Mickey himself had almost been named differently. Disney's wife persuaded Walt to drop the original name, Mortimer Mouse, in favor of Mickey. The character who almost wasn't became so central to American culture that his image generated revenue rivaling the films he starred in. A man in New York offered Disney $300 for the license to put Mickey Mouse on writing tablets, and Disney accepted. Within two years, merchandising manager Kay Kamen, whom Disney recruited from a Kansas City advertising firm in 1933, had built $35 million in sales from 40 Mickey Mouse licenses. A Mickey Mouse watch manufactured by the Waterbury Clock Company became so popular it reportedly saved that company from bankruptcy during the Great Depression. At a single Macy's promotional event, 11,000 watches sold in one day; within two years, two-and-a-half million had been sold across the country.

• 3. Snow White and the Risky Bet

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  In 1934, Walt Disney announced he would make a full-length animated feature film about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It would be the first cel-animated feature and the first animated feature produced in the United States. Critics and insiders called it "Disney's Folly". Roy tried to talk Walt out of it entirely, warning it would bankrupt the studio. Walt pressed on, directing his animators to approach scenes as though staging live action. The team also invented the multiplane camera during production, a device that placed drawings on panes of glass at different distances to simulate depth. The film's original budget was $150,000; by the time it was finished, it had cost $1.5 million and taken three years to make. Snow White premiered on the 21st of December 1937, and became the highest-grossing film up to that point, earning $8 million in its initial run. After subsequent re-releases, its total U.S. gross, adjusted for inflation, reached $998,440,000. The profits funded a new 51-acre studio complex in Burbank, California, where the company remains headquartered to this day. With Snow White's success, work began almost immediately on Pinocchio, which won the Academy Awards for Best Song and Best Score, and on Bambi. Despite their artistic achievements, both films performed poorly at the box office, partly because World War II had closed off the international market.

• 4. War, Strike, and Survival

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  In 1941, about 300 of the studio's 800 animators, led by Art Babbitt, one of the top figures at the company, went on strike for five weeks demanding unionization and higher pay. Walt Disney publicly accused the strikers of being part of a communist conspiracy and fired many of them, including some of the studio's most skilled artists. The strike's resolution forced the company to recognize the Screen Cartoonists' Guild. Federal mediators compelled the outcome, and the workforce shrank to 694 employees. While negotiations were ongoing, Walt and a group of studio artists took a 12-week goodwill tour of South America, funded by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. The trip produced the animated features Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944), both of which performed poorly. After the United States entered World War II, 500 U.S. Army soldiers occupied the studio for eight months to protect a nearby Lockheed aircraft plant. Soldiers used the large soundstages to store equipment and converted storage sheds into ammunition depots. The Navy commissioned Disney to produce propaganda films; Disney signed a contract for 20 war-related shorts for $90,000. To generate badly needed cash, the studio rushed the animated film Dumbo into production on a reduced budget, and it earned enough at the box office to stabilize the company. Disney also began re-releasing older feature films starting in 1944, a strategy that would become a recurring financial tool.

• 5. Disneyland and the Television Gamble

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  Walt Disney said he first imagined an amusement park while watching his daughters ride a carousel at Griffith Park. He wanted a place where parents and children could have fun together. What eventually became Disneyland started as a plan for an eight-acre Mickey Mouse Park near the Burbank studio, then grew into a 160-acre site in Anaheim, purchased at $6,200 per acre from orange grove landowners in Orange County. To finance construction, Disney sold his home at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs and used a television deal. A series called Disneyland aired on ABC beginning in 1954, garnering over 50% of viewers in its time slot. Construction costs for the park totaled $17 million. Disneyland opened on the 17th of July 1955, broadcast live on ABC with Art Linkletter, Bob Cummings, and Ronald Reagan as hosts. The opening day was chaotic: restaurants ran out of food, a riverboat began to sink, and drinking fountains failed in 100-degree heat. Despite that, the park drew 161,657 visitors in its first week and 20,000 a day in its first month. After two years, it had attracted more visitors than Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon combined. The ABC television deal also produced The Mickey Mouse Club, which after its first season was watched daily by over ten million children and five million adults. Two million Mickey Mouse ears were sold. In December 1954, the five-part miniseries Davy Crockett debuted as part of the Disneyland series; it sold 10 million Crockett coonskin caps and 10 million records of its theme song.

• 6. The Disney Renaissance

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  On the 17th of November 1989, The Little Mermaid was released, and it marked the beginning of what became known as the Disney Renaissance, a decade-long run of commercially successful and critically acclaimed animated films. The Little Mermaid earned $233 million at the box office, won the Academy Award for Best Original Score and Best Original Song for "Under the Sea", and was composed in part by Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, who together received six Academy Award nominations during the Renaissance period and won two. Ashman died in 1991 before the era concluded. Beauty and the Beast, released on the 13th of November 1991, became the first animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and the first to win a Golden Globe for Best Picture; it grossed nearly $430 million. Aladdin, released on the 11th of November 1992, grossed $504 million, the highest total for an animated film to that point and the first to reach half a billion dollars. "A Whole New World" from Aladdin became the only Disney song to win the Grammy for Song of the Year. The Lion King, released on the 15th of June 1994, became the second-highest-grossing film of all time behind Jurassic Park, with a gross total of $969 million. The era closed with Tarzan (1999), which earned $448 million and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for Phil Collins' "You'll Be in My Heart". Throughout the Renaissance, Michael Eisner, who became CEO in 1984 after shareholders voted out Ron Miller, had set a goal of producing an animated film every 18 months rather than the four-year pace the studio had maintained.

• 7. Acquisitions and the Modern Company

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  Under Bob Iger, who became CEO on the 1st of October 2005, Disney systematically acquired the intellectual property that now defines much of its business. Pixar was purchased from Steve Jobs in a deal announced on the 24th of January 2006, for $7.4 billion; with it came chief creative officer John Lasseter and president Edwin Catmull, both installed as heads of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Marvel Entertainment was acquired in August 2009 for $4 billion, adding its catalogue of comic-book characters to Disney's merchandising and studio operations. On the 30th of October 2012, Disney announced it would purchase Lucasfilm from George Lucas for $4.05 billion, gaining access to Star Wars, Indiana Jones, visual-effects house Industrial Light and Magic, and game developer LucasArts. The largest acquisition came on the 20th of March 2019, when Disney paid $71 billion for most of 21st Century Fox's assets. Through that deal, it gained 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures, National Geographic Partners, Star India, streaming service Hotstar, and a 30% stake in Hulu that brought its ownership to 60%. Disney launched its streaming service Disney+ on the 12th of November 2019, in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands. The service launched with 500 movies and 7,500 television episodes. Within its first day, it surpassed 10 million subscribers; by 2022 it had over 135 million and was available in more than 190 countries. The company also became the first film studio to have seven films gross $1 billion in a single year, with Avengers: Endgame alone reaching $2.8 billion, the highest-grossing film of all time up to that point.

• 8. One Hundred Years

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  The COVID-19 pandemic tested the company at a scale unlike anything since World War II. All Disney theme parks closed temporarily, cruises halted, and film releases were delayed. The company announced it would stop paying roughly 100,000 employees while continuing to provide healthcare, saving $500 million a month. In its second fiscal quarter of 2020, Disney reported a $1.4 billion loss, with earnings falling 91% from the previous year's $5.4 billion to $475 million. By September 2020-28,000 employees were dismissed from the Parks, Experiences and Products division, with 4,000 more laid off in November, bringing the total to 32,000. Bob Chapek, who had led Disney Parks for years and become CEO in February 2020, was ousted in 2022 and Bob Iger was reinstated. Josh D'Amaro, who had written the public letter explaining the 28,000 layoffs, became CEO in 2026. On the 16th of October 2023, Disney celebrated its 100th anniversary, exactly a century after Walt and Roy Disney signed the papers for Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. By 2023, the company had won 135 Academy Awards in total, 26 of them awarded to Walt personally, and ranked 48th on the Fortune 500 list of the biggest companies in the United States by revenue. The company has been publicly traded since 1940 and has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1991, when Dow Jones added it specifically because, as the company noted at the time, Disney "reflects the importance of entertainment and leisure activities in the economy".