Disney’s Super App Dilemma

Disney just had a very good quarter. Revenue rose 7% year over year to roughly $25 billion. Adjusted earnings beat Wall Street expectations. The company’s performance is particularly impressive given the macroeconomic conditions. Inflation is squeezing people’s discretionary spending. Airline travel has become exorbitant as the war with Iran drives jet fuel prices through the roof. And foreign tourists have decided that America isn’t exactly their favorite place to visit right now.

Still, Disney’s parks and cruises continue to attract families willing to spend thousands of dollars chasing moments of shared experience. It’s an indication of who Disney caters to. The company is benefiting from families in the top leg of a K-shaped economy. Folks in the bottom leg can’t afford eggs, much less a park ticket.

The numbers also say something positive about Josh D’Amaro, Bob Iger’s chosen successor. This was D’Amaro’s first earnings cycle as CEO, and the early signs are encouraging. But families plan vacations and book cruises months in advance. There’s still ample time for the macro factors to dent the business. Still, Disney finally appears to be regaining a sense of steadiness after several years of drift, internal drama, and industry upheaval.

Which is why one idea buried inside Disney’s recent earnings narrative deserves more attention than it’s getting.

D’Amaro has reportedly been pushing a broader “One Disney” vision. The goal is tighter integration between the company’s various businesses and guest experiences. From inside Disney, that logic is easy to understand. A family might watch Disney+ at home, plan a vacation through another interface, manage park reservations somewhere else, engage with ESPN through a different ecosystem, buy merchandise independently, and interact with fandom through platforms Disney doesn’t even control. Looking at that fragmentation, the opportunity feels obvious. Why not unify it all?

Bloomberg reported that execs are exploring how to unify the company’s sprawling collection of digital experiences into a single “super app.” The app would help consumers access everything from Disney+ to cruise planning. D’Amaro’s emerging “One Disney” strategy appears designed to simplify how customers interact with the Disney ecosystem by bringing the company’s various digital experiences under one roof.

This is a terrible idea.

To be sure, the problem of a fragmented guest experience is real. Disney absolutely should be thinking about how to create continuity across many of its properties. But a super app is the wrong solution. Moreover, it suggests that Disney may be confusing the assets it owns with the experiences it creates.

One App to Rule Them All

For years, corporate America has been fascinated with the idea of the super app. They’ve watched the success of WeChat in China, where users can message friends, pay bills, order food, book travel, buy movie tickets, schedule doctor appointments, hail rides, and manage much of their daily life from inside a single app. Companies like Grab and Gojek built similar integrated ecosystems across Southeast Asia. These successes created the impression that the future of digital life belonged to giant all-in-one platforms.

Execs love this idea because super apps promise everything modern companies crave: more engagement, more cross-selling opportunities, and deeper customer lock-in. If customers already trust your ecosystem in one area of life, why not extend that relationship into other areas?

The problem is that the streets of America are littered with the wreckage of failed super app attempts.

Meta has spent years trying to evolve Messenger and WhatsApp into broader commerce and payments ecosystems. Elon Musk continues to try transforming X into an “everything app.” Even Uber, probably the smartest Western attempt so far, has only succeeded to the extent that it focuses on moving people and things around a city.

Super apps succeeded in Asia partly because they emerged under very different conditions. In places like China, the smartphone became the primary gateway to the internet before consumers had deeply established desktop habits. Payment infrastructure and digital identity systems were less mature, which created opportunities for integrated mobile ecosystems to solve genuine problems of friction in commerce.

America evolved differently. Consumers here became accustomed to modular digital tools. One app for maps. Another for music. Another for dating. The economics of the App Store rewarded specialization. Whatever you wanted to do, Apple and Google wanted you to know that there was an app for that.

It’s also a reflection of how we think. American consumers prefer specialization because we distrust concentration. People become uneasy when they have to give all their information to one party. That doesn’t mean Americans like fragmented experiences. They just want to choose their own tools separately and then have those tools talk to each other.

That equation is about to evolve because of AI. While American consumers may not want a one-stop shop, they might be open to an intelligent system capable of going to multiple shops on their behalf. The future may not belong to super apps, but it might belong to super agents.

Or maybe not. Disney (and everyone else, for that matter) needs to figure out if that’s true. And since no one knows the answer yet, the problem requires more than benchmarking. It demands actual insight and creativity.

Creativity over Benchmarking

The distinction between creativity and benchmarking becomes especially important during periods of rapid social or technological change. Most companies love to benchmark other companies. Legacy management consultants have built an entire industry on that approach.

Benchmarking makes sense on the face of it. The success of any strategy feels more certain if you can point to three other people who did the same thing and won. Of course, that requires you to find other people who’ve actually cracked the problem. And you have to assume that their situation is exactly like yours. Execs fly to China, see WeChat, and then come back and try it for themselves. That dynamic feels smart. It just doesn’t help you invent anything new.

In 2022, Warner Media launched CNN+. The company reportedly spent hundreds of millions of dollars building the platform, while internal forecasts developed by McKinsey projected millions of subscribers within a few years. The logic seemed straightforward. Netflix had proven that consumers would pay directly for streaming content. CNN remained one of the most recognizable media brands in the world. If people were willing to subscribe to entertainment, why wouldn’t they subscribe to premium news?

The service was shut down less than a month after launch.

It turns out that the Netflix model isn’t applicable to CNN. People say they love quality journalism. They just aren’t willing to pay a subscription for immersive long-form viewing of the news. The folks who have TV news on all day long tend to be older viewers who haven’t fully switched to streaming. And younger people get their news from YouTube and TikTok.

The failure of CNN+ wasn’t a lack of intelligence. Firms like McKinsey are extraordinarily good at identifying patterns in existing markets. They excel at gathering and analyzing all the facts. But periods of discontinuity demand the creation of new facts. Smart people can make bad strategic decisions when they mistake analogy for insight.

The Conglomerate and the Kingdom

Which brings us back to Disney. The company’s challenge is actually much deeper than whether super apps work in America. While there’s a compelling need to integrate many of its properties, it need not integrate all of them. In seeking to create a single unified experience, Disney may be confusing its conglomerate with its kingdom.

The Disney conglomerate includes everything that it owns: Hulu, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, FX, Disney Cruise Line, parks, resorts, merchandise, gaming, and streaming all sit inside the same organizational machine.

But consumers don’t experience Disney organizationally. They experience Disney emotionally. They experience the Disney kingdom. The kingdom is the emotional world people enter when they interact with Disney. It’s the feeling parents trust when they hand the remote to their children. It’s the atmosphere that families enter when they walk down Main Street at Disneyland. It’s the reason adults cry during fireworks shows they’ve seen twenty times before.

The kingdom has rules. It has emotional coherence. Mickey and Donald belong in the kingdom. So do princesses. So does Pixar. Much of Marvel belongs in the kingdom, as well as certain Star Wars stories. These properties reinforce the emotional architecture that Disney has spent generations building.

But FX murder dramas? Adult Hulu content? ESPN betting integrations? Prestige nihilism? All of those things are part of the Disney conglomerate, but they have no place in the Disney kingdom. That distinction is getting lost.

When it launched, Disney+ was a gateway to the Disney kingdom. But not anymore. In their push for integration, execs can’t seem to understand why I don’t want my 8-year-old niece to turn on the Disney app and see a banner ad for Hulu’s latest horror movie. Every part of the kingdom needs to reinforce the same emotional world. If you wouldn’t build a ride for it at Disneyland, it doesn’t belong on Disney+.

What makes this particularly interesting is that for decades, Disney understood this distinction better than almost any company in the world. Touchstone Pictures was created precisely because Disney recognized that certain stories would disrupt the symbolic coherence of the core brand. Streaming economics now seem to be pressuring Disney to erase boundaries it once carefully protected. And yet, as AI increasingly handles utility and orchestration, emotional clarity may become more valuable, not less.

A super app only compounds the problem. Make no mistake: Josh D’Amaro is asking the right question: how do we create continuity across experiences? But the right answer isn’t one giant destination containing every Disney property. It’s far more likely to be an intelligent agent that helps families navigate the kingdom. Like Tinkerbell or the Blue Fairy.

The Leadership Question

That’s why this moment matters so much. Like every leader right now, D’Amaro needs to figure out how to move Disney into a new era while holding on to what makes it great. His team needs to leverage the promise of world-changing technology in a way that creates new value for customers. And the right way to do that doesn’t yet exist.

Periods of technological transition create enormous pressure to imitate demonstrated success. Every company wants to believe there’s a proven playbook out there. But simply copying what already exists rarely works on its own. The companies that shape the future build things that play to their own strengths. And they do so through no small measure of insight and creativity.

That’s a reminder for the rest of us. AI is arriving at a moment when people already feel overwhelmed by fragmentation, complexity, and noise. The temptation will be to solve that problem with systems that try to do everything at once. But human beings don’t experience life as a collection of integrated assets. We experience it emotionally, through trust, meaning, and coherence. The leaders who shape the next era won’t simply build bigger platforms. They’ll use technology to create experiences that help people feel more grounded, more connected, and yes… more human.