Inside Hollywood’s Succession Wars

There are many qualities that will be required to become the next CEO of the Walt Disney Co. Boldness. Intelligence. Poise. But at a recent off-site corporate retreat, Disney’s current leader, Bob Iger, offered another piece of advice for a top-level executive: “You need to be more selfish.”

What Iger meant, according to the source who relayed the comment, was that the execs vying to succeed him must be willing to go to extraordinary lengths to beat out their competitors. It might seem like odd advice coming from a leader with a public image as a smooth strategist whose roughest edge is that he works so hard, he showers in his office (sometimes twice). But as Iger himself has noted, when he ran ABC in the early 1990s, he employed what he called “soft autocracy” to push through ideas that met resistance. More recently, after hand-selecting Bob Chapek as his successor back in 2020, he reportedly spent the next two years undermining and outmaneuvering his successor behind the scenes, setting the stage for his own triumphant comeback. When it comes to advice about taking power, the man clearly knows what he’s talking about. (Disney firmly denies that characterization of Iger’s return as well as the executive’s account of the conversation. “That is not something Bob said, or would ever say, and the incident described simply never happened,” says Chief Communication Officer Kristina Schake.)

For the execs battling to succeed Iger, like entertainment co-head Dana Walden and parks honcho Josh D’Amaro, not to mention the whole cadre of Hollywood strivers eager for top jobs throughout town, being overly aggressive comes at the risk of looking desperate. You must be auditioning constantly but never overtly. As any outlet that covers Hollywood machinations knows, angry PR people working for top lieutenants call in a fury not only when their boss slips a rung on an executive power list but also when they are mentioned as a potential heir apparent. Because no one wants to risk looking like they are gunning for the crown before the king is ready to give it up.

Welcome to Hollywood’s modern Game of Thrones. All across the entertainment industry, there are pitched power struggles quietly being waged for the top gigs at CAA, Sony, Lucasfilm and other power centers that will determine the leadership of Hollywood’s top institutions for years to come. That these are happening at a moment of precariousness for the industry writ large makes the stakes that much higher. But to many, it’s a struggle long overdue. As THR reported in an October cover story, “The Big Squeeze: Why Everyone in Hollywood Feels Stuck,” as top-level execs have seemed frozen in place, those in their 30s, 40s and even 50s have been lamenting the existence of a “gray ceiling” that they say has cheated them out of their big moment. But in recent months, some cracks in that gray ceiling have started to appear.

Last year, across the U.S. economy, a record 2,221 CEOs stepped down, the highest level of turnover since 2002. In Hollywood, too, a generational turnover is happening — if too slowly for some — and it’s prompting all sorts of questions: What will this new cadre of leaders look like? How will they emulate the leaders who came before? And what will the metrics of success be in a town that’s reinventing itself?

Thanks to recent transitions, a few answers have begun to emerge. Some ascensions have been smooth, as when in September the 70-year-old Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Tony Vinciquerra announced that he would be stepping down to be replaced by 53-year-old Ravi Ahuja. Some more complicated: In March, UTA co-founder Jeremy Zimmer, 66, stepped aside as CEO, choosing David Kramer as his successor — but not on his timeline. And a week later, Endeavor’s $25 billion go-private deal with Silver Lake officially concluded the era of Ari Emanuel, 64, and Patrick Whitesell, 60, running WME — their long partnership ended in acrimony but their influence still looms large.

Meanwhile, some top jobs remain up for grabs — at Disney, of course, but also at subsidiary Lucasfilm, where accomplished-yet-controversial CEO Kathleen Kennedy is expected to end her reign shortly after Iger ends his. And then there’s the ongoing Trump-imperiled merger between Paramount and Skydance, which when consummated will see 71-year-old Shari Redstone pass the torch to 42-year-old David Ellison. That leadership team is set … if they only had a company to run.

When it comes to leadership transitions, success (or failure) is often measured by the chaos that follows. “Right now, with all the chaos in the industry, stability is like a drug,” says Terry Press, president of strategy and communications at Amblin Partners. “You want to be around it and you want to be in business with it.”

To that end, Universal and Netflix have both executed succession with little public drama. In November, NBCUniversal elevated Donna Langley — first hired way back in 2001 — to chairman (no big surprise after TV was added to her longtime gig running Universal Pictures). Netflix, meanwhile, executed two major succession maneuvers during the past 15 years: 2020’s announcement that Ted Sarandos would join founder Reed Hastings as co-CEO and then, when Hastings stepped aside in 2023, the ascension of COO Greg Peters as Sarandos’ co-CEO. (While media gossips speculated that Peters’ promotion irked Sarandos, insiders say the two men have such different fiefdoms — Sarandos lords over Hollywood, while product-focused Peters is in Silicon Valley — that actual evidence of tension is slim.)

Few entities have been able to pass the torch as smoothly. CAA, for example, has struggled to articulate what the future will look like should the three principals — co-chairman and CEO Bryan Lourd, co-chairman Kevin Huvane and co-chairman Richard Lovett — choose to exit after 30 years of shaping the most powerful talent agency in the world.

“It’s the defining issue for the industry today, and we need to be thoughtful about it because there are repercussions,” says Jeff Berg, who from his perch running ICM from 1985 to 2012 had a front-row seat to the previous power shifts that shaped the industry for a generation. He notes that the film and television industry might be shrinking but the companies that dominate it have gotten bigger thanks to acquisitions, consolidation, globalization and private equity. “If you get succession wrong,” he says, “you can’t unring that bell for a while.”

***

David Kramer, 56, had been waiting — patiently — in the wings. Three years earlier, UTA laid out the road map for what a post-Jeremy Zimmer era would look like when it announced that Kramer would be assuming the title of sole president, a role he previously had shared with Jay Sures. The announcement effectively anointed Kramer as the heir apparent and made it clear that his friend and co-president Sures, who had clashed with Zimmer, would not be getting the top job. The question then became, when would Zimmer actually leave?

A year passed. Then two. Then three, and still there was no clear timeline for Zimmer’s departure. Agents began to whisper about when, exactly, he would step down. Then came, quite literally, a conflagration. Like thousands of others, Kramer, who lives in Pacific Palisades, was forced to evacuate his home following the Palisades Fire in January. He and his family were taken in by Sures, and the two lived under the same roof for several weeks, according to a number of sources. Two months later, it was announced — seemingly out of nowhere — that Zimmer would be stepping down as CEO. “The [timeline] was executed from the bottom up,” says a UTA source who declined to speculate on whether Kramer and Sures had hastened Zimmer’s exit when the latter two were living together. At the agency, “There was utter unanimity about [the plan], and David is being celebrated. Is that a coup? I don’t know. But Jeremy didn’t get to choose the moment it happened,” says this source.

Adds a top agent who is in his late 50s: “Power is not given. It’s seized. It’s not something that’s gently passed on, and that’s from time immemorial.” This agent contends that the generation that has run Hollywood for decades was hungrier and more aggressive than the one that followed. “To any of the 47-year-olds out there who are wondering what the fuck happened to their careers? My response to them is: Why didn’t you push harder? Maybe this group turned out to be ill-equipped to seize it.”

Or maybe the Hollywood culture has just changed too much to make that kind of Machiavellian behavior viable. In recent years, Hollywood has lost some of its mojo. Decades of consolidation, a pandemic, two strikes and a pivot to streaming have resulted in a much smaller industry with fewer top jobs and less money sloshing around. The culture has changed, too. Algorithmic tech companies dominate. Data prevails over instinct and experience. Many of the much-caricatured qualities that used to be hallmarks of Hollywood power are now recognized as toxic. The personalities that now run this town are much different than the swashbuckling moguls who came before.

Take Zimmer, for example. He came up at a time when the industry was full of swaggering personalities like the late Brad Grey, Barry Diller, Amy Pascal and Michael Ovitz. Like them, Zimmer is known as a tough and savvy operator who as a boss could be both condescending but also wildly charismatic. His successor, Kramer, meanwhile, is as close to a universally beloved figure as you can find in this town.

A similar phenomenon has taken place at WME. Emanuel and Whitesell are larger-than-life. But agency co-chairmen Richard Weitz, 56, and Christian Muirhead, 45, who themselves report to the disciplined, operationally focused WME Group president Mark Shapiro, 55, are steady, calm, almost gentle (a term rarely associated with agents). They’re not exactly the dictatorial desk-pounding types, and some wonder if a softer style can work in a cutthroat industry: “If you want to stay in power for decades, you have to run an oppressive system, even if it’s subtle,” says a manager. “Power must be concentrated, and there has to be a level of fear. At WME, you did not cross Ari, and at CAA, you still do not cross Bryan, and there had to be repercussions for people who violated that.”

(And here it’s worth noting that Emanuel and Whitesell, no longer on speaking terms, aren’t exactly relinquishing their industry clout. Emanuel, who still manages a few clients, is CEO of TKO Group Holdings, owner of WWE and the Ultimate Fighting Challenge. Whitesell launched WIN Sports Group, taking the NFL talent representation business of WME — and both men are walking away from the agency business several hundred million dollars richer.)

“Richard and Christian are pursuing a different strategy,” says a WME source. “They’re more about the collective and trying to set people up for success. Previous leadership was much more self-interested, reflecting the era they were raised in — what was going to get them to the top. “

Producer Amy Baer, who started her career at CAA before becoming president of CBS Films, says: “The film and TV business has changed so drastically that I don’t know the profile of the next generation of leaders. There are so many big open questions. It used to be easy to see who would get the top jobs because the way movies and television were made and distributed was predictable. Nothing is predictable anymore.”

Maybe that unpredictability offers some small excuse as to how Disney botched things so badly on Iger’s first exit. Needless to say, the do-over is now the most watched succession game in town (and maybe the world). Wanting to avoid another debacle, in January the Disney board added James Gorman, chairman emeritus of Morgan Stanley, to oversee the search, which remains opaque even to high-level Disney insiders.

Still, sources say that D’Amaro — the parks and experiences chief — is now in pole position. The 54-year-old already was overseeing a $60 billion expansion of the parks business before Abu Dhabi — Disney’s first new park since 2016 — was announced in May. He also is overseeing Disney’s expansion into video games via a billion-dollar deal with Epic (the maker of Fortnite), which Iger views as a legacy project.

One hurdle for D’Amaro is the continuing fallout from Chapek’s disastrous run. Before his ascension, he also was the parks guy, and that showed in his inability to communicate with top Hollywood talent and their gatekeepers. D’Amaro has publicly tried to highlight the personal relationships he has with creatives to try to preempt that criticism. By contrast, Walden, the longtime television executive who has been rumored as a potential frontrunner since Iger returned, is a popular well-known figure within Hollywood’s talent community. As Disney’s first female CEO, her appointment also would carry major symbolic weight. One impediment for Walden, however, is her close friendship with Kamala Harris (which had been a boon just a few years ago). Given the vindictiveness of the Trump administration, it’s hard not to see the relationship as a potential liability, unfair as that may be.

Rounding out the shortlist of top internal candidates are Alan Bergman, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, and ESPN honcho Jimmy Pitaro. The 58-year-old Bergman is a company man, having joined back in 1996, and is regarded as sharp and skilled at overseeing a portfolio that includes Marvel, Pixar, Walt Disney Animation and Lucasfilm. But replacing Iger — an unmatched brand ambassador who looks like talent — probably requires a magnetism that Bergman can’t match (a liability he’s said to be aware of).

“This is the problem at Disney: How can you expect someone from theme parks to understand the process of making television and film? And how can you expect someone from television and film to understand how to work with the Chinese government?” says Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. “What’s the old saying — nobody knows anything. In this case, it’s nobody knows everything.”

***

As much as Hollywood likes to celebrate its buccaneer spirit, random events have played just as big of a role in determining who gets to rule. The 1994 helicopter crash that killed former Disney president Frank Wells would shape the industry for decades. Michael Eisner, Wells’ No. 2 at the time, elevated himself to president, which led the then-43-year-old Jeffrey Katzenberg to leave Disney and later co-found DreamWorks. With Katzenberg gone, Eisner hired a 48-year-old Ovitz, who had co-founded CAA with Ron Meyer, to be his lieutenant. When Meyer left CAA to run Universal, it opened a leadership vacuum that was filled by a group of young agents that included Lourd, Huvane and Lovett.

Rick Nicita was one of these so-called “Young Turks” who took over CAA. “It was an unwieldy succession plan, and I’m not quite sure how thought-out it was, but it was a plan,” he says. “And we were too young and naive at the time to think that we couldn’t do it.” Over time, the original nine were whittled down to three, leaving Lourd, Huvane and Lovett in charge. They have given no indication that they plan to step aside anytime soon.

“The idea that there’s any succession plan at CAA is an illusion,” says a president of production at a major studio who is on the phone every day with at least one CAA agent. “You can sense it from everyone you talk to over there. Everything is in service of Bryan Lourd.” Another veteran questions why they should feel any pressure to leave: “The company is theirs so they can do what they want.”

Some sources contend that the creation of internal boards within CAA spawned inflated titles for a handful of top agents, implying that a new batch of leaders was on the verge of taking the reins. That hasn’t happened. Others accuse Lourd and Huvane of playing one generation of top agents against the next. “They have done that for 31 years and it absolutely works,” says a former top agent.

Not long ago, the shortlist of potential successors included mostly agents on the talent side: Maha Dakhil (Tom Cruise, Natalie Portman), Joel Lubin (Taylor Sheridan, Glen Powell) and Franklin Latt (Pedro Pascal, Zendaya), along with Ida Ziniti (Steven Spielberg, Margot Robbie) and her husband, John Garvey (Chris Hemsworth, Rian Johnson). But with scripted content contracting and their sports business on the ascent, one source speculates the co-heads of sports, Howie Nuchow and Michael Levine, are in the mix.

Dakhil, who has one of the best client lists in town, was long considered a prime leader in waiting. But in 2023, she was suspended from her leadership roles within the agency after she posted a captioned photo on Instagram that accused Israel of “genocide,” which she promptly took down and apologized for. She since has regained her footing, but some insiders believe the episode bought the principals more time to maintain the status quo.

“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says a source who recently left the agency. “If you don’t empower and help the next generation grow, it reinforces the idea in Bryan and Kevin’s head that they’re the only ones who can do the job. And so of course then they can’t leave.”

***

When discussing the difficulty of selecting new leadership in an embattled industry, one name comes up often: Jason Kilar.

Kilar was appointed Warner-Media’s CEO in May 2020, near the middle of AT&T’s brief three-year ownership of the studio. With his degree from Harvard Business School and a tech-heavy CV, the 48-year-old came in with a mandate to shake things up. Sure, he had worked at Hulu, which gave him streaming experience, but he did not come up within the traditional confines of the film and television industry. These days, his two-year tenure running WarnerMedia is mostly remembered for Project Popcorn, the pandemic-era decision to release WarnerMedia’s entire 2021 slate of films simultaneously in theaters and on streaming. The move was intended to boost subscriptions to then-fledgling HBO Max. And it did. But Project Popcorn came at a steep cost — and not just in the form of forfeited box office. It strained relations with the agencies and infuriated top talent like Christopher Nolan, who set up his next film (the massive hit Oppenheimer) at rival Universal. Warners is still dealing with Project Popcorn’s fallout.

Kilar’s bold moves and harsh comeuppance beg the question: In an age of uncertainty, should Hollywood look to innovative but potentially disruptive outsiders or elevate from within?

“Hollywood has always been much more tradition-bound than people think. It has its own rhythms,” says Nicita. “If the tenet now is to move fast and break things, that’s not exactly in sync with the famous phrase ‘the past is prologue,’ which still applies to the movie business.”

Barry Diller concurs. “Hiring from the outside at the CEO level is an admission of failure,” says the IAC chairman and former Paramount boss. “Ideally, you bring someone in early in their career and they marinate in your enterprise, gain experience and succeed whoever is senior. That’s by far the better process. Bringing in a CEO whom you don’t know — and I don’t care how many hours you interview someone, you don’t know them — is a bad dice throw and rarely works.”

Lucasfilm seems likely to follow that path in replacing Kennedy. Despite speculation about outside candidates, including former 20th Century head Emma Watts, insiders say the company seems most likely to promote from within. The current thinking is a scenario where chief creative officer Dave Filoni and production head Carrie Beck — both Lucasfilm vets — take co-head roles. Even as an arm of Disney, Lucasfilm remains, in many ways, a family business, and as a George Lucas protégé Filoni long has been considered a golden boy. But the knock against him is that he might be too steeped in Star Wars lore and risks steering a show into dense mythology that loses a broader audience. “He’s not the Andor guy, he’s the Ahsoka guy,” says one Disney insider. Beck, who joined the company in 2012, knows the ins and outs, but neither she nor Filoni has much film experience, which could be mitigated by Kennedy’s continued presence as a producer on certain Star Wars projects, ensuring quality control in the short term.

Sony went the other way — looking outside. When Vinciquerra stepped down in January, he quietly executed his own succession plan, having recruited Ahuja in 2021, a year after he abruptly left Disney in the aftermath of the Disney-Fox merger. Now Ahuja has a succession saga to sort out himself — at Sony’s film studio.

In May, he seemed to table the issue when he reupped 70-year-old movie boss Tom Rothman for several more years. According to insiders, Ahuja still believes in Rothman and wasn’t keen on a big shake-up, not when the studio has momentum, is profitable and is about to undertake the ambitious and risky move of releasing all four of Sam Mendes’ Beatles films in April 2028.

The bigger question inside the studio is what Ahuja thinks of Rothman’s two top lieutenants, Motion Picture Group co-presidents Josh Greenstein, who focuses on marketing and distribution, and Sanford Panitch, who focuses on production. In the past year, Greenstein has told people that he’d likely leave Sony if Rothman were reupped. One scenario that’s been floated is Greenstein reuniting with his friend and Skydance owner David Ellison after the Skydance-Paramount merger. Whether there’s a place for Greenstein remains to be seen. Ellison has selected former NBCUniversal bigwig Jeff Shell as president, Dana Goldberg to run the film side and former Netflix content chief Cindy Holland to run Paramount+.

Of course, all of them will answer to Ellison. Because, even in Hollywood, the one sure way to own the throne is to buy the kingdom.

Rebecca Keegan, Borys Kit, Pamela McClintock and Alex Weprin contributed to this report.

This story appeared in the June 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.