Bob Chapek Lost the Disney Job and Is Still Appealing the Verdict

Bob Chapek

Photo: elisfkc2 / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1960 Hammond
Occupation	Business Executive

Bob Chapek’s memoir keeps circling one question: what did he do to lose the job? “The answer, again, is nothing,” he writes about the Sunday night when the Walt Disney Company board gave the chief executive’s office back to Bob Iger. In the book he names the person responsible. Iger, he says, played “an intentional and preconceived role in abruptly ending my ride as Disney CEO.” He also claims to have spotted Josh D’Amaro, the parks executive who now runs Disney, before anyone else did. Iger declined to comment on the excerpts, and Disney has kept quiet.

What a book can’t change is the thing most visitors remember about his tenure, which is the bill. The free airport bus to Walt Disney World went, and the free FastPass line gave way to the paid Lightning Lane, while tickets, food and annual passes all got more expensive. Chapek still doesn’t apologise for any of it. “We’d been, at a minimum, leaving revenue opportunities on the table to avoid stirring the hornet’s nest,” he writes.

His road to the castle started near the oil refineries on the southern rim of Lake Michigan. Robert Alan Chapek was born in 1960 and grew up in the Robertsdale neighbourhood of Hammond, Indiana. His father, Bernard, was a Second World War veteran who worked as a machinist at a refinery in Whiting, and his mother, Marie, worked for an insurance agency in East Chicago. He was an altar boy at St. John the Baptist church in Whiting, and the family took a trip to Walt Disney World every year. He studied microbiology at Indiana University, earned an MBA at Michigan State University and spent his early working years in brand management at H. J. Heinz and in advertising at J. Walter Thompson.

He joined Disney in 1993 as marketing director of Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a division that still made its money from VHS cassettes. He spent most of two decades in that unglamorous corner of the company, moving its catalogue onto DVD and then Blu-ray, and became president of the division in 2006 and president of distribution for Walt Disney Studios in 2009. “He was always an executive that you knew would be on the rise,” Michael Eisner said later.

In 2011 Chapek took over Disney Consumer Products. After the Lucasfilm acquisition he brought Star Wars merchandise into Disney’s licensing machine, and in 2013 he got Hasbro to pay $80 million in royalties to extend its Marvel toy licence, plus up to $225 million for the coming Star Wars products.

His real audition came at the parks. Named chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts in February 2015, replacing Tom Staggs, he inherited Shanghai Disneyland halfway through its construction. The $5.5 billion resort had slipped behind schedule, and Iger flew to China more than ten times to watch how his parks chief handled budgets and builders. It opened in 2016. Pandora – The World of Avatar followed at Animal Kingdom, then the two Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge lands in California and Florida. According to The New York Times, Chapek put more than $24 billion into parks, hotels and cruise ships, a sum larger than what Disney paid for Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm combined. In 2018 consumer products came back under his control.

Iger picked him as successor in February 2020. It surprised many Disney employees, who had expected Kevin Mayer, who had overseen the launch of Disney+, to get it. Iger stayed on as executive chairman, and according to reports he kept his office and joked about “Big Bob” and “Little Bob.” Within weeks the pandemic had shut the parks Chapek knew best. In October 2020 he reorganised the company so that a new distribution unit under Kareem Daniel, rather than the creative chiefs, controlled budgets and release decisions. Mulan went to Disney+ for an extra fee and Soul skipped cinemas altogether. When Black Widow premiered in theatres and on streaming on the same day, Scarlett Johansson sued, arguing the release had cost her earnings. Disney settled with her for undisclosed terms.

The case against Chapek doesn’t depend on Iger’s version of events. In early 2022 he declined to take a public position on Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act and argued in a memo that corporate statements are often “weaponized” and change few minds. Disney’s own staff and creative talent were angry, and within days he apologised and froze the company’s political donations in Florida, a reversal later seen as a main trigger of the state’s move against Disney’s special district at Walt Disney World. In June 2022 the board renewed his contract for three years. Then on 8 November the company reported that Disney+ had reached 164.2 million subscribers while the streaming division lost about $1.5 billion in the quarter, and earnings per share came in at 30 cents against the 55 analysts had expected. Twelve days later he was gone. His memoir puts most of the blame on sabotage. It repeats, from unnamed sources, a suspicion that Iger left in 2020 because he saw the pandemic coming, and The New York Times noted that the book offers no evidence for it.

The exit package was expected to be worth about $23.4 million. A 2023 securities lawsuit accusing Chapek and other executives of misleading investors about Disney+ subscriber numbers was dropped by the plaintiffs within months. In January 2024 he joined the board of Masimo, the medical technology company, reportedly chosen by its founder, Joe Kiani. A proxy fight then ended Kiani’s tenure, and Chapek resigned, effective at the company’s annual meeting in 2025, without citing any disagreement. Meanwhile D’Amaro, whom Chapek had named parks chairman in May 2020, was chosen as Disney’s next chief executive in February 2026 and took over in March. “I consistently suggested the idea of promoting him,” Chapek writes.

Chapek and his wife, Cynthia, married in 1980. They have three children, one of them the Marvel Studios producer Brian Chapek, and they live in Westlake Village, California.

Behind the Castle Walls: My Thirty Years at the Happiest Place on Earth came out from Gallery Books on 29 September 2026, with the British edition following in October. On CNBC he said he had written it because “I felt like I had to get the truth out there.” In print he puts it less politely: “I didn’t get a chance to finish what I started. In truth, it pisses me off.” He will keep making that case on the promotional circuit this autumn. The company, now run by the executive he says he discovered, has nothing to say about it.

Tags: business, Disney, ceos, business leaders, Bob Iger, Bob Chapek, Josh D’Amaro, The Walt Disney Company, Behind the Castle Walls