Bob Chapek’s memoir defends the Disney World prices that outlasted him

I worked at Walt Disney World. I never heard a cast member talk about Bob Chapek the way they talked about Bob Iger. Iger I met once. He came across as a person who still remembered how to stand in a room with working people. I was not a fan of Chapek, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong, and his new book deserves a fair reading.

The book is Behind the Castle Walls: My Thirty Years at the Happiest Place on Earth, written with Don Yaeger. Gallery Books publishes it Tuesday, Sept. 29. Brooks Barnes of The New York Times obtained a copy and wrote about it on Sept. 23. Vanity Fair ran an excerpt on Sept. 24, and The Hollywood Reporter published one too. It is the first time Chapek has told his side of Nov. 20, 2022, the Sunday night Disney’s board of directors fired him and brought Iger back as chief executive.

What Chapek says about his firing

Chapek writes that the firing left people “trying to figure out what I did wrong. The answer, again, is nothing.” He blames Iger. Iger picked him for the job in February 2020 and stayed on as executive chairman until the end of 2021. Iger played “an intentional and preconceived role in abruptly ending my ride as Disney C.E.O.,” Chapek writes, and he describes “a relentless three-year campaign to push me out.” He wanted more time, too. “I didn’t get a chance to finish what I started. In truth, it pisses me off.”

A spokesman for Iger declined to comment to The Times. So did a spokesman for Josh D’Amaro, who became Disney’s chief executive on March 18, 2026. Disney itself declined to comment, The Independent reported.

The prices he stands behind

Chapek ran Disney’s parks from 2015 until he became chief executive in 2020, and several things that had been free at Disney World started costing money on his watch. Disney began charging guests at its Florida hotels to park in March 2018, $13 to $24 a night. Iger was still chief executive then, and Chapek ran the parks under him. FastPass, the free ride reservation system, did not come back when Disney World reopened in July 2020 after the pandemic closings. In its place, on Oct. 19, 2021, with Chapek as chief executive and Iger still executive chairman, came Genie+, which charged $15 a day at Disney World to use the shorter Lightning Lane lines. Disney’s Magical Express, the free bus from Orlando International Airport to the resort hotels, ended for arrivals starting Jan. 1, 2022.

The book doesn’t apologize for any of it. “We’d been, at a minimum, leaving revenue opportunities on the table to avoid stirring the hornet’s nest,” Chapek writes. He argues that higher prices helped reduce crowding and raise guest satisfaction, The Times reported, and he cites 18 percent compound annual profit growth during his years running the parks.

Disney’s reported figures don’t directly support that 18 percent. Disney’s fiscal year ends in early fall. Operating income is the profit from running a business before interest and taxes. For the parks and resorts division, it went from $3.03 billion in the 2015 fiscal year to $4.47 billion in 2018, the last year Disney reported parks and resorts on their own. That works out to about 14 percent a year. The division did grow 18 percent in the single year of 2018. The Times account doesn’t say how Chapek arrived at his number.

His last full year as chief executive had strong numbers. In fiscal 2022, Disney’s parks, experiences and products division, which by then also took in toys and other merchandise, earned a record $7.9 billion in operating income. Disney+ grew to 164.2 million subscribers by Oct. 1, 2022, counting the Disney+ Hotstar service in India. Disney+ was still losing money.

What Disney kept after he left

After he left, Iger ran Disney again for more than three years. Most of the prices stayed. The one clear rollback was hotel parking, which went back to free at the Florida resorts on Jan. 10, 2023. Lightning Lane, meanwhile, got more expensive. On July 24, 2024, Disney World replaced Genie+ with Lightning Lane Multi Pass and Single Pass, and a Lightning Lane Premier Pass followed that sells for roughly $129 to $449 a day. Annual passes kept going up; the top Disney World pass, the Incredi-Pass, rose from $1,549 to $1,629 in October 2025. Magical Express never came back, though free luggage delivery from the airport returned for some resort guests in March 2025.

D’Amaro took over the parks in May 2020, three months after Chapek became chief executive, and ran them under both men before he got the top job himself.

Why the board let him go

The reporting on his firing pointed to streaming losses and to people inside the company. Disney’s streaming business lost $4 billion in fiscal 2022, and $1.47 billion of that came in the last quarter. Disney reported those results on Nov. 8, 2022, 12 days before the board let Chapek go. The board’s chair, Susan Arnold, gave no reason in her statement. CNBC’s David Faber, citing people he did not name, reported that the board reached out to Iger after that earnings report. The Financial Times reported that the chief financial officer, Christine McCarthy, was among the executives pushing to replace Chapek.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Disney’s creative executives resented a reorganization Chapek made in 2020, which moved control of content budgets to a new distribution division run by his ally Kareem Daniel. CNBC later reported that the studio chief, Alan Bergman, had clashed with Daniel. The day after Iger returned, Disney announced that Daniel was leaving.

Florida and Scarlett Johansson

Chapek’s critics also point to two public fights on his watch. In early 2022 the Florida Legislature was passing the Parental Rights in Education bill, which limits classroom lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity. Critics called it “Don’t Say Gay.” Chapek kept Disney quiet at first. At the shareholder meeting on March 9 he said he had called Gov. Ron DeSantis to raise the company’s concerns. Two days later he apologized to employees in a letter: “You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down.” DeSantis signed the bill on March 28. On April 22 he signed another ending Disney’s special self-governing district around Disney World, the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

Under Chapek, Disney also fought Scarlett Johansson in public. She sued Disney in July 2021, saying the company’s decision to put Black Widow on Disney+ the same day it opened in theaters cut into her pay. Disney answered that the suit showed “callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the COVID-19 pandemic,” and the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA and actors including Jamie Lee Curtis and Elizabeth Olsen came to her defense. The two sides settled on Sept. 30, 2021, without disclosing terms.

His claims about Iger and D’Amaro

Chapek writes that he was told by “several high-ranking people both in government and private business” that, in their opinions, Iger left the top job so abruptly in 2020 because he saw COVID coming. The Times says he offers no evidence for it. Disney has previously denied it. Iger told Ben Smith, then The Times’s media columnist, in April 2020 that there was “nothing different or odd to speculate about” in the timing.

Chapek calls himself a disrupter. By The Times’s count, he uses the word or a form of it about 30 times. He also takes credit for D’Amaro’s rise. “I consistently suggested the idea of promoting him,” he writes, and D’Amaro “had been a relative unknown in the corporate hierarchy before I singled him out.” D’Amaro ran Disneyland and then Disney World while Chapek was parks chairman.

What to make of the book

Whatever Iger and D’Amaro thought of Chapek, they kept most of what he started charging for. His profit figure doesn’t match Disney’s reports, and Iger hasn’t answered his account of the firing.