Walt Disney on Leadership Transition

Roy Oliver Disney, eight years older than Walt, co-founded the Disney Brothers Studio in October 1923 and ran the business side of the enterprise for the rest of his life. He was convalescing from tuberculosis at the Sawtelle Veterans Home in Los Angeles when Walt visited late at night to ask for help launching the cartoon studio after securing the Winkler distribution deal; Roy agreed, left the hospital the next morning, and never suffered a relapse. While Walt led the creative side, Roy guided business and finances as an equal partner in all facets of the production company, became the company's first chief executive officer in 1929, and shared the chairmanship with Walt from 1945 until Walt dropped the title in 1960 to concentrate on creative work. After Walt's death from lung cancer in December 1966, Roy postponed retirement to oversee construction of Disney World, renamed it Walt Disney World in tribute to his brother, and opened the resort five years later at a cost of about four hundred million dollars without additional debt, before dying weeks after the dedication.

Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966, during the initial planning of the complex and before construction began, and the company wrestled with whether to bring the Disney World project to fruition until his older brother Roy came out of retirement to see the project through. Construction started in 1967, and the company dropped the planned community in favor of a theme park resort modeled on Disneyland, with the Magic Kingdom, Polynesian Village Resort, and Contemporary Resort Hotel opening October 1, 1971 before a deliberately moderate crowd of about ten thousand guests, sized to avoid the overcrowding of Disneyland's opening. At the grand opening ceremony on October 23 through 25, Roy dedicated the property and declared it Walt Disney World, saying that people knew Ford cars but not Henry Ford, and that the name would keep his brother's memory alive as long as the park stood. Walt Disney World became the most visited vacation resort in the world, the largest single-site employer in the United States, and the flagship of the company's experiences business.

Disney's plans for a functioning futuristic city never came to fruition. After his death his brother Roy deferred retirement to take full control of the Disney companies, changed the Florida project's focus from a working town to an attraction, and at the 1971 inauguration dedicated Walt Disney World to his brother. Epcot Center opened in 1982 as a permanent world's fair rather than the functioning city Disney had described. Posthumous releases raised the number of feature films he had been involved in to eighty-one, and the 1968 short Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day earned him a posthumous Academy Award. After his death the studios produced live-action films prolifically while the quality of animated features was allowed to languish, until the trend reversed in the Disney Renaissance that began with The Little Mermaid in 1989. By 2014 the Disney parks around the world hosted roughly 134 million visitors a year, and his company had become one of the world's largest media conglomerates.