It’s a day of big movie moves at the Mouse House. Top feature film executive Sean Bailey (pictured) has officially stepped down after 15 years of running Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Production as president. 

To replace him, the media giant has set up Searchlight co-president David Greenbaum in a newly created role as president of live action and 20th Century Studios. This brings both units under the purview of Greenbaum—who reports to Disney Entertainment co-chairman Alan Bergman. 

Bailey is best known for shepherding popular live-action adaptations of Disney’s classic animated films, including billion-dollar grossers like Beauty and the Beast (2017) and The Lion King (2019). Over the past five years, he has also overseen the Disney+ live-action movie pipeline, with credits such as Hocus Pocus 2 (2022) and Lady and the Tramp (2019). 

However, Disney is coming off of one of its weaker years at the box office, marked by the failure of family horror pic The Haunted Mansion (which earned US$118 million worldwide against a US$150-million budget) and an underperforming remake of The Little Mermaid (which grossed nearly US$570 million for a price tag of US$240 million).

It remains to be seen how the studio may tweak or change its live-action strategy under Greenbaum, whose experience tends to be more adult-skewing, with prestige projects like 2017’s Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water. Coming up, Disney is prepping a prequel to The Lion King called Mufasa, with live-action adaptations of Snow White, Moana and Lilo & Stitch lined up next.

Updated at 2:00 pm: On the TV side of things, Danyel Mendoza has just been promoted into a newly created role as VP of programming strategy and content planning for all Disney branded networks (Disney Channel, Disney Junior and Disney XD). 

Mendoza has worked at the company for nearly three decades, most recently serving as director of multiplatform programming strategy and content planning for both Disney Channels and National Geographic. In her expanded remit, she’ll oversee the strategy teams for both linear and nonlinear platforms, as well as working closely with the DTC programming teams to migrate content from branded networks to Disney+ and Hulu. 

Mendoza will continue reporting to Christian Drobnyk, EVP of programming for FX, Nat Geo, Freeform and Disney Branded TV, who called out her children’s media expertise in a release: “[Mendoza] is a true team player working collaboratively across the company to develop, launch and grow key multiplatform priorities.” Under her digital experience, she strategized the relaunch of National Geographic Kids YouTube and also spearheaded the rollout of original anthology shorts from Disney TVA.