What If Marriott Had Bought Disney

25.08.2023 - 14:46 / skift.com

In the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the James Stewart character George Bailey sees how life would change had he never been born. That’s a fantasy, of course, but like George Bailey, I began imagining recently while watching the Walt Disney Company’s latest leadership drama unfold how a company’s timeline could be altered under a different scenario.

As a business journalist, I have studied, reported on, and written about Disney closely since the 1980s, which brings me to this exercise of reimagining history.

Take Marriott, which in 1984 was a 142-hotel chain in the midst of a major expansion. Its George Bailey moment came, according to news reports at the time, when it considered — but then denied —  an opportunity to join corporate raider Saul Steinberg’s $1.4 billion bid to buy a controlling 49 percent stake in the ailing Disney. A key driver of bringing these two iconic companies together at the time was Marriott’s Chief Financial Officer Gary Wilson.

By 1984, Disney’s stock had cratered after years of lackluster movies and unimpressive attendance at its two-year-old Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida.  After Disney fended off takeover bids, Disney’s new CEO Michael Eisner led a brilliant revival of the Mouse House. In fact, Eisner hired Wilson away from Marriott to be his own top finance executive a year later with a board seat as an incentive. 

Like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” had Marriott decided to join Steinberg’s bid — and it succeeded in winning Disney — both Marriott and its prey could look vastly different than they do today. And other companies might as well.

Disney’s mammoth 28,000 acres in Florida was clearly the prize of Steinberg’s hostile bid. Marriott could have used a chunk of that property to build gleaming new hotels. It was certainly fertile territory: Disney, despite having two large theme parks on that land, only had two hotels on that property — and hadn’t built a new one in 13 years.

Disneyland was also ripe for a new hotel. Disney didn’t even own the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California. That was owned by Texas billionaire Jack Wrather, a friend of founder Walt’s who bailed him out when Disney had tapped out his finances in building the park. 

Those two sites would have come along at a good time for Marriott. It told shareholders in its 1984 annual report that it was developing all-suite hotels and vacation ownership resorts and intended “to add 25,000 high-end hotel rooms by 1988.”  

Beyond that, a Disney deal could have boosted the diversification strategy Marriott struggled to pull off back then, and infuse the company with much-need creativity. At the time, Steinberg was said to have approached Marriott as the hotel chain was selling off the two of