The Same Smile

I met Josh D’Amaro at a Disney leadership conference at the Contemporary Resort, around 2021 or 2022. I was a senior software engineer. He was chairman of the parks division. I shook his hand. He smiled and told each of us how much we were appreciated and how much the company needed us.

A few years later I see the same smile. He is the CEO of the Walt Disney Company now. The company behind the smile is very different, and the people feeling that change most are the hourly cast members.

I should say where I’m standing before I go any further. I recently left Disney after a bad experience, and I’m not going to pretend I’m an impartial observer. Most of what follows is driven by my own experience, which is anecdotal evidence. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It does mean it probably isn’t the typical experience, and where I’m hard on the company, that’s partly my situation talking. I’ve been on good teams at Disney, and I wrote about the best of them in Better Off That Way.

Here is the claim, and it’s narrow. D’Amaro’s warmth is a real skill, and it isn’t the same thing as care. Since he took over, the bill for running Disney leaner has gone to the people at the bottom, while the top has stayed whole. The charge isn’t that Disney wants to make money. It’s what the smile is used to sell.

The babyface

In pro wrestling, the babyface is the good guy the crowd is booked to cheer. D’Amaro is the old classic babyface. He joined Disneyland in 1998, ran Walt Disney World, then ran the whole parks division, and he built a reputation along the way as the executive who walks Main Street and poses for selfies. A Page Six columnist who interviewed him meant it as praise: “He’s an exec who’s so media trained, he can speak in sound bytes, remember reporters’ names and pose for selfies with the flocks of Disney Adults who recognize him strolling Main Street USA.” (Page Six) The board named him CEO in February 2026, by unanimous vote. (The Walt Disney Company)

Jesus gave a warning about this kind of figure: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:15–16) I held the church’s bargain with power up to that verse in The Gift That Blinds. D’Amaro isn’t wearing a religious costume. His is the nice, all-American guy. I’m not judging his heart; that isn’t my place. I’m watching the fruit.

The record has one fact that cuts both ways. In October 2020, as chairman of the parks division, he walked Walt Disney World apologizing to cast members after the company laid off nearly 28,000 of them. (WDW News Today) Cast members loved it. One wrote that he “came back over just to hear me thank him profusely and take a picture with him.” (Chip and Company) I believe he meant it. I also notice that walking the parks to apologize is something you do after the layoffs.

At that same conference he gave a talk on what it means to be a leader. It was a good speech. He told us never to use your title as your authority. Around the parks, people did exactly that every day, including while he ran them. I don’t know that he ever did it himself. I’d assume he knew. He’s a smart guy.

Not Chapek

To be fair to Josh, he isn’t Bob Chapek, and the comparison isn’t one-to-one.

Chapek, the parks executive who became CEO in 2020, reorganized the company so that a central distribution unit controlled the budgets and the profit-and-loss statement for every movie and show. The creative studios had to go through it to get projects made. (CNBC) When Iger came back, undoing that was one of the first things he did. (The Walt Disney Company)

D’Amaro went the other way. He made Dana Walden, one of the most respected creative executives in the business, President and Chief Creative Officer, with authority over film, television, and streaming, and by most accounts he’s letting her run it. (Variety; IndieWire) That’s a good thing. A parks executive who knows what he doesn’t know about Hollywood is a better CEO than one who doesn’t. Whatever I say about the parks below, the studios got a better deal from him than they got from Chapek.

The ledger

Disney has been through wave after wave of layoffs since he took over in March 2026. About 1,000 roles in April, as he consolidated marketing. Several hundred in July, mostly at Pixar and National Geographic. About 300 in September, mostly in human resources and technology. (CNBC) Then on October 28, 100 to 200 more in Experiences, the parks division he used to run, with most of the cuts at Imagineering. (Deadline; Los Angeles Times) In September the company’s chief legal officer warned his division of “hard choices,” and described a “transformation process” that includes “automating certain workflows by leveraging the latest technologies.” (Deadline)

For a while the cut to spousal health coverage was a rumor. It isn’t anymore. Starting in 2027, a cast member can’t put a spouse or domestic partner on Disney’s medical plan if that person can get coverage through their own employer. (Business Insider; Hollywood Reporter) A benefits adviser told Business Insider that dropping the option entirely, rather than charging more for it, is highly unusual. Disney’s statement called it “measured adjustments.” The union for Walt Disney World’s full-time cast members told its members that this year’s enrollment would not roll over automatically, and that most medical plans would cost more. (STCU)

Cast members are being asked to do more with less, and to watch the machines arrive. When Walt Disney World piloted AI self-checkout at a resort food court, the union asked to bargain over it and said “AI should not be used by any company as an excuse to eliminate workers.” (BlogMickey) That pilot was later pulled. The direction wasn’t.

And through all of it, the smile. His first-year package as CEO is worth about $45 million: a $2.5 million base salary, a target bonus of $6.25 million, a yearly stock award target of $26.25 million, and a one-time promotion award of $9.705 million. (SEC filing; Fortune) The offer letter says the salary is “payable weekly,” the same schedule as a cast member’s check. That is more money than most cast members will earn in their lifetimes, paid in a year. The CEO before the CEO before him, Chapek, left with an exit package of about $20 million. (CNN)

The cost of living here

Orlando is an expensive place to live, and cast member pay isn’t great. Wages did go up under the 2023 union contract, and that deserves credit, but former cast members describe rent swallowing the raises. (Disney Dining) Too many cast members live in RVs, in their cars, or worse. One former cast member described sleeping in the West Clock employee parking lot and seeing “so many people sleeping in their cars in that parking lot.” Another, who played characters at Walt Disney World in the early 2010s, told Business Insider she lived in her Chevy Malibu while working there. Disney has since announced plans for more than 1,000 affordable apartments in Orange County, open to cast members and the wider community, and that’s real. (Business Insider)

I think Disney adds to the problem in two ways.

The first is deskilling. In Point and Click I wrote about the Photopass photographer, a job engineered so no photography skill is required. A job designed to need no skill is easier to pay less for, and easier to hand to a machine later. Deskilling is the step before automation. That’s my argument, not a statistic; I don’t have wage data by skill level, and I won’t pretend to.

That’s what makes the automation pitch sting. When we started working on IoT and automation projects, our tech director sold us a blue-sky picture: cast members walking the parks with their new free time, helping guests. I believed it, and some of that work was genuinely good. I still love DClean, a project that used sensors to make a custodial cast member’s hard job easier. But judge it by the fruit. What I saw instead was hours cut, a smaller workforce, and dirtier parks. The purpose wasn’t the guest. It was the bottom line. Which is fine. What makes it feel fake is the costume: selling a margin decision as guest magic. That’s the same move as the smile.

The second is that nobody can compete with Disney inside the gates. Take the fountain soda. I don’t know Disney’s syrup terms with Coca-Cola, and I’m not going to guess at them in print. I do know that a fountain drink is mostly water, ice, and syrup, and that inside the resort there’s no one across the street who can sell it to you for less. My read, and it’s only my read: much of what you’re paying for in there isn’t the product. It’s the position. That’s not magic. That’s shrewd economics, and it’s rent-seeking, which means charging for where you stand rather than what you make.

Seen of men

I knew it was time to leave at my ten-year Service Celebration in January 2026. It’s the one night a year Disney closes Magic Kingdom early for cast members celebrating milestone anniversaries. It used to be designed for cast members. Right as you arrived at the Ticket and Transportation Center, where you catch the ferry or the monorail to the park, there was a media section. The influencers got escorted in. We got the luxury of waiting nearly an hour for the ferry. I didn’t feel very appreciated in that moment. The cast members weren’t the point of the night anymore. The point was making sure the influencers got their footage, so the company got its digital media and its marketing.

Disney’s own account of that night called it “a living snapshot of who Disney cast members are: a culture where cast feel valued.” The USA Today Network was “one of the few invited by Disney to attend.” (Herald-Tribune) The Disney Parks Blog wrote it up too. (Disney Parks Blog)

In Stage Actors I wrote about the word Jesus used for people who perform their faith. The verses just before that passage: “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.” (Matthew 6:1–2)

The influencer economy reaches the front line, too.

One of my favorite things about being a cast member was the magical moment. Disney empowered cast members to help a guest in distress with a small freebie. As a software engineer I never gave one myself, but I got to see one as a guest. It was the lunch rush at a quick-service restaurant, and anyone who’s been to Walt Disney World in a busy season knows what that looks like. It’s not easy to get in and out. A mother was waiting in a crowded line with a crying toddler. A cast member noticed, asked what she needed, which was just a milk for her child, and went and got it. Free, no questions asked.

That is a magical moment. A tiny gesture that turns a bad day into a good one, and that guest will remember it. Disney deserves a ton of credit for that. It’s one of the best things the company ever built, and it didn’t cost much. Moments like that one made me proud to be a cast member.

The point was the distress. Filming ruined it. Now guests walk up to a cast member and ask, “Where’s my magical moment?” You don’t just walk up and ask for one. But the entitlement only matches what guests see presented as normal in influencer videos, and the people absorbing it are the front-line staff. That’s what I saw, not a trend I can measure.

Price raises the bar too. Leadership keeps raising prices, and higher prices raise expectations. In late 2026, a one-day Magic Kingdom ticket on the busiest holiday dates costs $209, the first time a Walt Disney World one-day ticket has passed $200. (WDWMAGIC) The cheapest one-day ticket went from $109 to $119 in two years. (Deadline)

We were sitting in an airport once and overheard a group of teachers buying Walt Disney World tickets, to visit while they were in town for a conference. One of them was excited about the option to buy with Klarna and pay over time. Installment loans for theme park tickets. Magical.

Disney doesn’t offer Klarna directly, but its own planning panel tells guests a Klarna virtual card works at checkout and adds, “I also love having the option to make payments over time.” (planDisney) Disney’s payment page advertises PayPal’s pay-in-four plan for ticket purchases. (Walt Disney World) In a 2024 LendingTree survey, 45% of Disney-going parents with children under 18 said they had gone into debt for a Disney trip, about $1,983 on average. (LendingTree)

So picture it from the guest’s side. You went into debt for a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and a cast member isn’t as warm with you as they were with the influencer in the video. Sometimes people get offended. And I get it. You expected one standard and got another. What the video didn’t show you was everyone else waiting three hours in the Florida heat for a ninety-second ride. That’s one more way leadership has made the job harder for its own cast.

The verse after the trumpet is the one the magical moment used to live by: “But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” (Matthew 6:3)

Belt-tightening runs one way

Every year we had less and less to work with. Tightening of the belts. But the belt only seemed to move one way. It’s not as if the executive offices got smaller and more bare. In No Conference Rooms I wrote about executive offices that grew until the team that was ordered back for collaboration had nowhere to hold a meeting. It’s the worker bees who get fewer resources to do their jobs, and that shows up as a worse experience for the guest. Executives talk about hard choices. Their pay has been fine.

Here’s where some of the money went instead.

In September 2025, Disney sent Character.AI, the chatbot platform, a cease-and-desist letter. The letter said its chatbots of Disney characters were “known, in some cases, to be sexually exploitive and otherwise harmful and dangerous to children,” and it pointed to a report that found the platform’s bots engaged in “grooming and sexual exploitation” with accounts registered to children. (Axios) Disney’s words, not mine.

In October 2026, Character.AI filed for bankruptcy, and Disney stepped in as the opening bidder, agreeing to pay about $20 million for a license to its technology. (NBC News) Court filings show Disney required the deal to go through bankruptcy because of the startup’s “significant litigation and regulatory risks,” so the liabilities stay with Character.AI. (Ars Technica) Disney also agreed to hire most of its staff, at least 60 people, at an estimated $60 million a year in total compensation, and its former CEO became the first chief technology officer for Disney as a whole. (TechCrunch) The same September those hires began, Disney laid off about 300 people, mostly in HR and technology.

To be fair, bringing in talent from a tech company is a good move. Disney isn’t a tech company, and I spent eleven years watching what that costs. My objection is the source. This feels like a deal with the devil: a bankrupt platform that Disney’s own letter accused of exploiting its characters and called dangerous to children, still facing lawsuits from Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Are those the people and the culture you want to bring in?

Spending the reputation

For a long time we were told that Disney’s strength was its reputation. People trusted us. That goodwill is now being spent, and some of the spending started before D’Amaro was CEO. He inherited it and kept going.

Paid lines. Line-skipping used to be free. FastPass+ was replaced by paid Genie+ in 2021, and Genie+ was replaced by Lightning Lane Multi Pass in 2024, while D’Amaro ran the parks. (WDW Magazine) In 2026, Multi Pass has cost between $15 and $42 per person, per day, depending on the park and the date. (RopeDrop) Disney created a price for space in line. The way you grow that revenue is by slowly moving people out of the free queue and into the paid one.

Disability access. I can’t prove what’s behind the recent changes to Disney’s Disability Access Service, the program that lets guests who can’t wait in a regular line get a return time instead. I strongly believe they’re meant to push people out of DAS and into the paid service. That’s inference, and I’m calling it inference. Here’s the record around it.

A DAS return time puts a guest in the Lightning Lane, alongside the guests who paid. (Los Angeles Times) In May 2024, while D’Amaro ran the parks, Disney narrowed eligibility to guests who, “due to a developmental disability like autism or similar,” can’t wait in a conventional line. (NBC News; WDW News Today) Autistic guests like me are still covered. Many guests with physical disabilities are not: people with Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, mobility disabilities. (SpecialNeeds.com; AP) Disney’s stated reason, in fairness, is that use of the program tripled in five years, including by people it wasn’t meant for. (NBC News)

Disabled guests are fighting it in court. A class action filed in California in February 2025 argues that the new criteria screen out guests with physical disabilities in violation of the ADA and California civil rights law. Disney says the claims are “without merit.” (USA Today) The case is still pending, with discovery on hold while the court decides whether to dismiss it. (LegalClarity) A Florida civil rights complaint from a power-wheelchair user went to investigation in spring 2026 before she withdrew it in October, with no finding either way. (Disney Tourist Blog; Ghost Light Access) An appeals court ruled in 2022 that the earlier DAS met the ADA, but that case asked whether Disney had to offer more access, not whether it can narrow who qualifies. (LegalClarity)

At the March 2026 shareholder meeting, his first as CEO, someone asked D’Amaro whether Disney would restructure DAS. He said: “Creating a welcoming and inclusive environment for all guests, especially those with disabilities — it’s foundational to who we are.” He made no promise to change it. (WDW News Today) Ninety-five percent of shareholders voted against even commissioning an independent review of the program’s risks. (Disney Dining)

AI. Besides Character.AI, Disney announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI in December 2025, licensing more than 200 characters to its video generator, Sora. (The Walt Disney Company) The deal fell apart in March 2026 when OpenAI shut Sora down, reportedly before any money changed hands. (Reuters)

Sports betting. ESPN licensed its name to a sportsbook in 2023 for $150 million a year. (PENN Entertainment) Since December 2025, DraftKings has been ESPN’s exclusive sportsbook, built into the ESPN app, and in 2026 fans could link their accounts and bet on their own March Madness brackets. (ESPN Press Room; DraftKings)

This isn’t the same Disney.

The franchise playbook

That conference was a good picture of my time at Disney. One session was required because our CTO was hosting it. It was an open Q&A, mostly about her own career, and I didn’t come away knowing much more about where we were headed. The sessions I picked were better. One was about failing fast. The speaker talked about TV ideas at ESPN that failed and led to series that worked. A failed idea can spark better thinking. You want that in creative work, but it has to be contained, which means failing early. We never had that on my team. We waited until things were on fire to fail. The irony.

Disney does the same thing with its stories. Look at it from a distance and it’s the same problem every time. Disney has valuable IP and can’t figure out how to use it without wearing it down until it looks like the rest of its IP. Oversaturation is a chronic issue, and two of its own executives have said a version of that on the record.

Why make the live-action Moana so close to Moana 2? The remake opened on July 10, 2026, about eighteen months after the sequel. It made about $324 million worldwide on a reported $250 million budget; Moana 2 made more than $1 billion. (Box Office Mojo; The Numbers) Walden’s explanation: “I think it was hurt by the proximity to our second animated version of ‘Moana’… So perhaps there was not enough time to create a lot of pent-up demand for another film.” (Bleeding Cool)

The Marvel movies were a money printer for a decade. In 2023, Iger said that in the company’s “zeal” to fill Disney+, Marvel’s output “diluted focus and attention.” (CNBC) Marvel’s three movies in 2025 made about $1.32 billion worldwide combined, less than Deadpool & Wolverine made by itself the year before. (The Direct) In fairness, Spider-Man: Brand New Day crossed $2 billion in August 2026 (Variety), though that’s a Sony co-production and Disney’s share is a 25% profit split (Hollywood Reporter). Cooled, not dead.

Star Wars has a lot of franchise fatigue right now. The Mandalorian and Grogu had the lowest opening weekend of any Star Wars film under Disney and finished around $345 million worldwide. (The Guardian) D’Amaro, on the August 2026 earnings call: “‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ drove healthy growth in retail sales for the ‘Star Wars’ franchise and drew guests to the updated Millennium Falcon attraction at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.” (Variety)

Disney kept making more because the brand would carry it, until it didn’t. So I wonder about the Character.AI assets. Disney licensed the platform’s code, its training infrastructure, and its safety tools. It didn’t license the characters, because the platform was built on other people’s. (Ars Technica) Will those tools get the same treatment?

When Star Wars and Marvel wore thin, they had the Disney brand underneath them to fall back on. The Disney brand doesn’t have anything underneath it. Where do you go once you kill the Disney brand?

Has it felt different?

What made Disney great was great storytelling paired with amazing customer service. I think the new leaders misunderstand that. Customer service has largely been given up on, and the storytelling has gotten cheap and plastic, just enough for an influencer to film a TikTok. That’s my read on the parks, which D’Amaro ran for six years, not on the studios he handed to Walden.

So I’ll ask you. Have your visits felt different over the past couple of years? Mine have, both from the inside and from the outside. And to be clear, I don’t blame the cast members. They’re just trying to survive. They’re treading water.

Entertainment has been dropped and patched. Magic Kingdom’s Festival of Fantasy parade has had a run of breakdowns, missing floats, and cancellations in fall 2026. (Inside the Magic) The Christmas parade normally plays only at a separately ticketed after-hours party. Every guest in the park gets to see it on November 10 and 11, 2026, the days ABC films it for television. (Mickey Visit via Yahoo)

There have been more fights in the parks, too, or at least it feels that way to me; I haven’t found anything that measures it. The incidents keep making the news. On New Year’s Day 2026, a man admitted to punching a 14-year-old at the Magic Kingdom ferry dock. (WDWActiveCrime) In March, a guest was arrested for allegedly punching a cast member at Animal Kingdom Guest Relations over a refund. (WDWActiveCrime) In April, a father was arrested for allegedly grabbing and shaking the cast member escorting Mirabel at EPCOT because his child had to wait to meet her. He has pleaded not guilty. (People)

I don’t have data for this one, but in my opinion the quality of the merchandise has really fallen off.

And we have alcohol in Magic Kingdom now. For most of its history it was a dry park, and for years after that, a drink meant a sit-down meal. Then came bars. The Beak and Barrel, a pirate bar in Adventureland, opened in 2025. (Disney Food Blog) On October 4, 2026, the Diamond Horseshoe reopened as a pop-up lounge (Attractions Magazine), and for the first time, guests can walk up and get a drink in Magic Kingdom without a reservation or a sit-down meal. One guide described its margarita as “a bright pink, made-for-the-photo drink.” (Drinking Around the World) EPCOT is already known mostly for drinking around the world. The target audience for the new product, as I see it, is the influencer marketing it to you at home.

The people who left

Park leadership’s handling of COVID is part of why the stock hasn’t recovered. That’s my view, not a market analysis, but the stock closed at $109.04 on October 28, 2026, about 45% below its March 2021 record. (Stock Analysis; Morningstar) The best cast members found new jobs during their furlough. We lost our best people. In Have the Courage I wrote about how misery doesn’t select at random: the people with options leave first, and the people with options are your best. That pain has been felt by guests and by the frontline cast. It hasn’t been felt by the executive with the big pay package and the bigger, newly renovated office.

Listen to them

My message to anyone in Disney leadership reading this is simple. You have great people working for you. Listen to them, and respect them. If you don’t, the pain will be profound. They have already been through this once.

I think about that handshake more than I expected to. He told each of us how much we were appreciated and how much the company needed us, and I remember his smile pulling me in. His authenticity is so sincere until you look at the fruits of his labor. I’ve seen the same smile on every stage since.