The Walt Disney $DIS Company is an American multinational entertainment and media conglomerate headquartered in Burbank, California. It is one of the largest entertainment companies in the world by revenue, with operations spanning film and television production, theme parks and resorts, consumer products, and streaming media.
Walt Disney and his brother Roy O. Disney founded the company in 1923 as a small animation studio in Los Angeles. Its earliest success came through animated characters — most notably Mickey Mouse, who debuted in the 1928 short film "Steamboat Willie" — and feature-length animated films such as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), the first feature-length cel-animated film in cinema history.
Over the following decades, Disney expanded well beyond animation. It opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California in 1955, launching what became a global theme park business. Today, Disney operates or licenses parks and resorts on multiple continents, including Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida — its largest resort complex — as well as parks in Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
The company's media holdings grew substantially through a series of acquisitions. Disney purchased ABC and the ESPN sports broadcasting network in 1995, and has since expanded ESPN's holdings to include NFL Network and other NFL digital assets. Disney also acquired Pixar Animation Studios in 2006, Marvel Entertainment in 2009, Lucasfilm (the home of the Star Wars franchise) in 2012, and the bulk of 21st Century Fox's entertainment assets in 2019. Those deals gave Disney as part of its streaming strategy. — making its characters among the most widely licensed in the world.
