If you’ve been a close follower of Disney’s financial data, however, D’Amaro’s promotion to the top office isn’t really a surprise.

Disney reports three principal operating segments: 

• Entertainment, which includes Disney films, television, and streaming services such as Hulu and Disney+;

• Sports, which is ESPN and various other sports channels overseas; and

• Experiences, which are the Disney resorts and cruise lines.

One might assume that Disney is primarily an entertainment business because these are the folks who, ya know, invented Mickey Mouse and made zillions of dollars from the Avengers movies. But Disney reports revenue and operating profit for each of the three operating segments above — and if you were a close follower of those segment-level disclosures, you’d have seen that Disney has, inexorably, become more of an experiences company in recent years. 

Let’s start with Figure 1,  below. It shows quarterly revenue from Disney’s Entertainment and Experiences segments since the start of 2023.

Yes, the Entertainment segment (in blue) does generate more revenue overall, but compare the trend lines. The Experiences segment (in red) definitely has a more upward slope. (We excluded the Disney sports segment because its revenues are less than half the other two segments.)

Figure 2, below, shows the operating profit for Entertainment and Experiences over the same periods.

The Experiences segment generates multiple times more operating profit than the Entertainment segment. Yes, Entertainment’s operating profit is trending upward more rapidly, but it’s still just a fraction of what Experiences throws off.

The health of the Experiences segment is D’Amaro’s doing. Moreover, Disney is rolling out more parks in the near future, and it’s a business one can understand. The Entertainment segment still inhabits a strategic free-for-all zone where nobody is quite sure how artificial intelligence, social media, and evolving consumer appetite for going to the movies will all shake out.

So if Disney was going to select an Iger successor from the inside, D’Amaro was always going to be at the top of a very short list. All a Disney analyst on the outside had to do was study the segment-level disclosures over time.

Finding Segment Disclosures

As always, that’s easy to do in Calcbench. 

For starters, try our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts page. Select the company you want to research, and then the segment you want to study from the pull-down menu at left. (You can search for operating, geographic, and other segments that a company might report.) 

Figure 3, below, shows the results when you search for Disney’s operating segment disclosures in its fiscal Q1 2026, the numbers filed earlier this week. The blue-highlighted column is the Experiences segment mentioned above.

From there you can export the data to Excel for further analysis.

If you stumble upon a segment disclosure while studying a company on the Disclosures and Footnotes Query page, you can always hold your cursor over that number for the See Tag History and Export History to Excel choices. Same data, exported to the same user (you), just via a different channel.

And of course if you use the Calcbench API, all this data gets pumped directly into your own desktop analysis models within minutes of the company’s filings hitting the Securities and Exchange Commission database. All of it groomed, polished, and traceable as always.

Our ultimate point being that you can connect those human elements of corporate analysis, like possible CEO succession, back to corporate data. Sometimes the signs are there all along, if you just know how to tease them out — like, by using Calcbench.