The Walt Disney Company, commonly and globally known as simply Disney, is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Founded on October 16, 1923, as an animation studio by brothers Walt Disney and Roy Oliver Disney as Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, Disney operated under the names Walt Disney Studio and Walt Disney Productions before adopting its current name in 1986. In 1928, Disney established itself as a leader in the animation industry with the short film Steamboat Willie. The film used synchronized sound to become the first post-produced sound cartoon, and popularized Mickey Mouse, who became Disney's mascot and corporate icon.
After becoming a success by the early 1940s, Disney diversified into live-action films, television, and theme parks in the 1950s. However, following Walt Disney's death in 1966, the company's profits, especially in the animation sector, began to decline. In 1984, Disney's shareholders voted Michael Eisner as CEO, who led a reversal of the company's decline through a combination of international theme park expansion and the highly successful Disney Renaissance period of animation from 1989 to 1999. In 2005, under the new CEO Bob Iger, the company continued to expand into a major entertainment conglomerate with the acquisitions of Pixar in 2006, Marvel Entertainment in 2009, Lucasfilm in 2012, and 21st Century Fox in 2019. In 2020, Bob Chapek became the head of Disney after Iger's retirement. However, Chapek was ousted in 2022 and Iger was reinstated as CEO. Josh D'Amaro became CEO of Disney in 2026.
Disney operates the largest television and film studio in Hollywood. Walt Disney Studios includes Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Studios, 20th Century Animation, and Searchlight Pictures. Disney's other main business units include divisions operating the ABC television network; cable television networks such as Disney Channel, ESPN, Freeform, FX, and National Geographic; publishing, merchandising, music, and theater divisions; direct-to-consumer streaming services such as Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, and Hotstar; and Disney Experiences, which includes several theme parks, resort hotels, and cruise lines around the world.
Disney is one of the biggest and best-known companies in the world. Often regarded as one of the most influential entertainment brands in history, Disney is credited with revolutionizing the animation industry. In 2023, it was ranked 87th on the 2023 Forbes Global 2000, and 48th on the Fortune 500 list of biggest companies in the United States by revenue. Since its founding, the company has won 135 Academy Awards, 26 of which were awarded to Walt. The company has produced films which have been featured on many lists of the greatest films of all time and is one of the key players on the development of the theme park industry. The company has been public since 1940 and trades on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1991. In August 2020, about two-thirds of the stock was owned by large financial institutions. The company celebrated its 100th anniversary on October 16, 2023.
History
1921–1927: Founding and Winkler Pictures
In 1921, American animators Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks founded Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri. A ragtag team of animators led by Disney went on to create numerous short films at the studio. The final one, in 1923, was entitled Alice's Wonderland and depicted child actress Virginia Davis interacting with animated characters. While Laugh-O-Gram's shorts were popular in Kansas City, the studio went bankrupt in 1923 and Disney moved to Los Angeles, to join his brother Roy O. Disney, who was recovering from tuberculosis. Shortly after Walt's move, New York film distributor Margaret J. Winkler purchased Alice's Wonderland, which began to gain popularity. Disney signed a contract with Winkler Pictures for $1,500 to create six series of Alice Comedies, with an option for two more six-episode series. Walt and Roy Disney founded Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio on October 16, 1923, to produce the films. In January 1926, the Disney's moved into a new studio on Hyperion Street and the studio's name was changed to Walt Disney Studio.
thumb|left|upright=.5|alt=Black and white rabbit in pants jumping|One of Disney's first animated characters, [[Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which Disney regained the rights to in 2006. The initial run of Oswald shorts by Disney entered the public domain in 2024.]]
The Walt Disney Studio at the time solely handled animation services, while all other aspects of production were handled by Winkler Pictures; Winkler eventually dropped their distribution services, as her husband Charles Mintz and brother George Winkler took over as producers, finding a distributor in Universal Pictures. In 1927, Mintz asked for a new series, and Disney created his first series of fully animated shorts, starring a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The series was produced by Winkler Pictures and distributed by Universal Pictures. In 1928, Disney and Mintz entered into a contract dispute, with Disney asking for a larger fee, while Mintz sought to reduce the price. Disney discovered Universal Pictures owned the intellectual property rights to Oswald, and Mintz threatened to produce the shorts without him if he did not accept the reduction in payment. After Disney declined and returned to Los Angeles, Mintz hired a majority of Disney's animators into his in-house studio, most of whom were tired of Disney's ineffective leadership. A few employees, including Iwerks and Les Clark. Before their departure, 26 Oswald films were completed with Disney's involvement.
1928–1934: Mickey Mouse, and Silly Symphonies
Disney and Iwerks reincorporated the company as Disney Cartoons. They replaced Oswald with a mouse character originally named Mortimer Mouse, before Disney's wife urged him to change the name to Mickey Mouse. In May 1928, Mickey Mouse debuted in test screenings of the shorts Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho. Later that year, the studio produced Steamboat Willie, its first sound film and third short in the Mickey Mouse series, which was made using synchronized sound, becoming the first post-produced sound cartoon.
After the release of Steamboat Willie at the Colony Theater in New York, Mickey Mouse became an immensely popular character. Powers ended his contract with Iwerks, who later started his own studio. Carl W. Stalling played an important role in starting the series, and composed the music for early films but left the company after Iwerks' departure. In September, theater manager Harry Woodin requested permission to start a Mickey Mouse Club at his theater the Fox Dome to boost attendance. Disney agreed, but David E. Dow started the first-such club at Elsinore Theatre before Woodin could start his. On December 21, the first meeting at Elsinore Theatre was attended by around 1,200 children. On July 24, 1930, Joseph Conley, president of King Features Syndicate, wrote to the Disney studio and asked the company to produce a Mickey Mouse comic strip; production started in November and samples were sent to King Features. On December 16, 1930, the Walt Disney Studios partnership was reorganized as a corporation with the name Walt Disney Productions, Limited, which had a merchandising division named Walt Disney Enterprises, and subsidiaries called Disney Film Recording Company, Limited and Liled Realty and Investment Company; the latter of which managed real estate holdings. Walt Disney and his wife held 60% (6,000 shares) of the company, and Roy Disney owned 40%.
thumb|left|Excerpt of [[Steamboat Willie (1928), the first Mickey Mouse sound cartoon.]]
The comic strip Mickey Mouse debuted on January 13, 1930, in New York Daily Mirror and by 1931, the strip was published in 60 newspapers in the U.S., and in 20 other countries. After realizing releasing merchandise based on the characters would generate more revenue, a man in New York offered Disney $300 for license to put Mickey Mouse on writing tablets he was manufacturing. Disney accepted and Mickey Mouse became the first licensed character. In 1933, Disney asked Kay Kamen, the owner of a Kansas City advertising firm, to run Disney's merchandising; Kamen agreed and transformed Disney's merchandising. Within a year, Kamen had 40 licenses for Mickey Mouse and within two years, had made $35 million worth of sales. In 1934, Disney said he made more money from the merchandising of Mickey Mouse than from the character's films.
The Waterbury Clock Company created a Mickey Mouse watch, which became so popular it saved the company from bankruptcy during the Great Depression. During a promotional event at Macy's, 11,000 Mickey Mouse watches sold in one day; and within two years, two-and-a-half million watches were sold. The film was the first full-color cartoon and won the Academy Award for Best Cartoon. The song from the film "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", which was composed by Frank Churchill—who wrote other Silly Symphonies songs—became popular and remained so throughout the 1930s, and became one of the best-known Disney songs. Walt directed the animators to take a realistic approach, creating scenes as though they were live action. While making the film, the company created the multiplane camera, consisting of pieces of glass upon which drawings were placed at different distances to create an illusion of depth in the backgrounds. After United Artists attempted to attain future television rights to the Disney shorts, Walt signed a distribution contract with RKO Radio Pictures on March 2, 1936. Walt Disney Productions exceeded its original budget of $150,000 for Snow White by ten times; its production eventually cost the company $1.5 million. Using the profits from Snow White, Disney financed the construction of a new 51-acre studio complex in Burbank, which the company fully moved into in 1940 and where the company is still headquartered. In April 1940, Disney Productions had its initial public offering, with the common stock remaining with Disney and his family. Disney did not want to go public, but the company needed the money.
Shortly before Snow White's release, work began on the company's next features, Pinocchio and Bambi. Pinocchio was released in February 1940 while Bambi was postponed. Despite Pinocchios critical acclaim (it won the Academy Awards for Best Song and Best Score and was lauded for groundbreaking achievements in animation), the film performed poorly at the box office, due to World War II affecting the international box office.
The company's third feature Fantasia (1940) introduced groundbreaking advancements in cinema technology, chiefly Fantasound, an early surround sound system making it the first commercial film to be shown in stereo. However, Fantasia similarly performed poorly at the box office. In 1941, the company experienced a major setback when 300 of its 800 animators, led by one of the top animators Art Babbitt, went on strike for 5 weeks for unionization and higher pay. Walt Disney publicly accused the strikers of being party to a communist conspiracy and fired many of them, including some of the studio's best. Roy unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the company's main distributors to invest in the studio, which could no longer afford to offset production costs with employee layoffs. The anthology film The Reluctant Dragon (1941) ran $100,000 short of its production cost, contributing to the studio's financial woes.
thumb|left|alt=Man dressed as a gaucho with someone dressed as Donald Duck|Walt (right) dressed as a gaucho next to Donald Duck in [[Argentina while on the company's South American goodwill trip in 1941.]]
While negotiations to end the strike were underway, Walt and studio animators embarked on a 12-week goodwill visit to South America, funded by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. During the trip, the animators began plotting films, taking inspiration from the local environments and music. As a result of the strike, federal mediators compelled the studio to recognize the Screen Cartoonist's Guild and several animators left, leaving it with 694 employees.
In August 1942, Disney released its fifth feature film, Bambi, after five years in development, and performed poorly at the box office. Later, as products of the South American trip, Disney released the features Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944). As a result of its financial problems, Disney began re-releasing its feature films in 1944. In 1948, it began premiering the nature documentary series, True-Life Adventures, which ran until 1960, winning 8 Academy Awards. In 1949, the Walt Disney Music Company was founded to help with profits for merchandising.
1950–1967: Live-action films, television, Disneyland, and Walt Disney's death
In the 1950s, Disney returned to producing full-length animated feature films, beginning with Cinderella (1950), its first feature in eight years. A critical and commercial success, Cinderella saved Disney after the financial pitfalls of the wartime era; it was its most financially successful film since Snow White, making $8 million in its first year. Walt began to reduce his involvement with animation, focusing his attention on the studio's increasingly diverse portfolio of projects, including live-action films (of which Treasure Island was the studio's first), television and amusement parks. In 1950 the company made its first foray into television when NBC aired "One Hour in Wonderland", a promotional program for Disney's next animated film, Alice in Wonderland (1951), and sponsored by Coca-Cola. Alice was financially unsuccessful, falling $1 million short of the production budget. In February 1953, Disney's next animated film Peter Pan was released to financial success; it was the last Disney film distributed by RKO after Disney ended its contract and created its own distribution company Buena Vista Distribution.
thumb|left|alt=Several men looking at plans together|Walt (center) showing the plans of Disneyland to officials from Orange County in December 1954
According to Walt, he first had the idea of building an amusement park during a visit to Griffith Park with his daughters. He said he watched them ride a carousel and thought there "should be ... some kind of amusement enterprise built where the parents and the children could have fun together". Initially planning the construction of an eight-acre (3.2 ha) Mickey Mouse Park near the Burbank studio, Walt changed the planned amusement park's name to Disneylandia, then to Disneyland. A new company, WED Enterprises (now Walt Disney Imagineering), was formed in 1952 to design and construct the park. Drawing inspiration from amusement parks in the U.S. and Europe, Walt approached the design of Disneyland with an emphasis on thematic storytelling and cleanliness, innovative approaches for amusement parks of the time. The plan to build the park in Burbank was abandoned when Walt realized 8 acres would not be enough to accomplish his vision. Disney acquired 160 acres (65 ha) of orange groves in Anaheim, southeast of LA in neighboring Orange County, at $6,200 per acre to build the park. Construction began in July 1954. Walt formed a new company called Retlaw to handle his personal business, primarily Carolwood Pacific Railroad.
To finance the construction of Disneyland, Disney sold his home at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs and the company promoted it with a television series of the same name aired on ABC. The Disneyland television series, which would be the first in a long-running series of successful anthology television programs for the company, was a success and garnered over 50% of viewers in its time slot, along with praise from critics. In August, Walt formed another company Disneyland, Inc. to finance the park, whose construction costs totaled $17 million.
In October, with the success of Disneyland, ABC allowed Disney to produce The Mickey Mouse Club, a variety show for children; the show included a daily Disney cartoon, a children's newsreel, and a talent show. It was presented by a host, and talented children and adults called "Mousketeers" and "Mooseketeers", respectively. After the first season, over ten million children and five million adults watched it daily; and two million Mickey Mouse ears, which the cast wore, were sold. In December 1954, the five-part miniseries Davy Crockett, premiered as part of Disneyland, starring Fess Parker. According to writer Neal Gabler, "[It] became an overnight national sensation", selling 10 million Crockett coonskin caps. The show's theme song "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" became part of American pop culture, selling 10 million records. Los Angeles Times called it "the greatest merchandising fad the world had ever seen". In June 1955, Disney's 15th animated film Lady and the Tramp was released and performed better at the box office than any other Disney films since Snow White.
Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955; it was a major media event, broadcast live on ABC with actors Art Linkletter, Bob Cummings, and Ronald Reagan hosting. It garnered over 90 million viewers, becoming the most-watched live broadcast to that date. While the park's opening day was disastrous (restaurants ran out of food, the Mark Twain Riverboat began to sink, other rides malfunctioned, and the drinking fountains were not working in the 100 °F. (38 °C) heat), In 1956, the Sherman Brothers, Robert and Richard, were asked to produce a theme song for the television series Zorro. The company hired them as exclusive staff songwriters, an arrangement that lasted 10 years. They wrote many songs for Disney's films and theme parks, and several were commercial hits. In the late 1950s, Disney ventured into comedy with the live-action films The Shaggy Dog (1959), which became the highest-grossing film in the U.S. and Canada for Disney at over $9 million, and The Absent Minded Professor (1961), both starring Fred MacMurray.
Disney also made live-action films based on children's books including Pollyanna (1960) and Swiss Family Robinson (1960). Child actor Hayley Mills starred in Pollyanna, for which she won an Academy Juvenile Award. Mills starred in 5 other Disney films, including a dual role as the twins in The Parent Trap (1961). Another child actor, Kevin Corcoran, was prominent in many Disney live-action films, first appearing in a serial for The Mickey Mouse Club, where he would play a boy named Moochie. He worked alongside Mills in Pollyanna, and starred in features such as Old Yeller (1957), Toby Tyler (1960), and Swiss Family Robinson. In 1964, the live action/animation musical film Mary Poppins was released to major commercial success and rapturous critical acclaim, becoming the year's highest-grossing film and winning five Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Julie Andrews as Poppins and Best Song for the Sherman Brothers, who also won Best Score for the film's "Chim Chim Cher-ee".