Michael Eisner joined the Disney Company in 1984 and helped recraft it throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In the process, he helped make Disney into a television powerhouse, climaxing those efforts with a takeover of Capital Cities-ABC ( American Broadcasting Company) on the last day of July 1995. Through the final sixth of the 20th century, the Disney Company, with its ever-increasing profits, was held up as a quintessential American business success story. It produced popular culture fare embraced around the world. Yet when Michael Eisner assumed leadership of the company, Disney was in trouble. It was Eisner and his staff who turned the ailing theme park company into a media powerhouse.

Eisner brought a rich base of executive experience to Disney. He had begun his career at the ABC television network and then moved to Paramount under former ABC boss Barry Diller. The two men made Paramount the top Hollywood studio during the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1978, just two years after Diller and Eisner arrived, Paramount had moved to the head of the major studio race. Led by Grease, Saturday Night Fever, and Heaven Can Wait, Paramount took in one-quarter of the Hollywood box office in that year.

When Eisner moved to Disney, he immediately sought to revitalize the company. He hired Hollywood's new “Irving Thalberg,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, then barely 30 years old, to make moves under two new “brand names”: Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures. (Eisner and Katzenberg worked well together until 1994, when Katzenberg moved to Dream Works, with new partners Steven Spielberg and David Geffen)

The new Disney turned out hit feature films, including Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Ruthless People. In 1997, when Three Men and a Baby pushed beyond $100 million in the box office, it became the first Disney film ever to pass that vaunted mark. Three Men and a Baby represented a quintessential example of the new Disney, drawing its stars, Ted Danson and Tom Selleck, from the world of television.

From the base of solid feature-film profits, Eisner then began to remake Disney into a TV power. The Studio quickly placed hits such as Golden Girls on primetime schedules. By the early 1990s, Disney's Home Improvement and Ellen consistently ranked in TV's prime-time top ten. Disney also expanded into the TV syndication business. The company created a very successful syndicated program by hiring film critics Gene Siskel and  Roger Ebert to review movies, including those produced by Disney.

Not all Disney movies into television have prospered. In 1986 Eisner revived Disney's family-oriented Sunday night TV show in a prized 7:00 p.m. time slot on ABC, with himself as host. However, he proved not to be “Uncle Walt,” and he was forced to cancel The Disney Sunday Movie, for which he also served as executive producer, in 1988. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) then picked up a modified version of the program, now called The Magical World of Disney; with Eisner as executive producer and host, this Sunday evening program aired for two years, 1988 to 1990, before succumbing to the fate of its ABC predecessor. Like many before and after him, it seemed that Eisner could not compete successfully with the Columbia Broadcasting System’s (CBS) 60 minutes. Seven years later, however, Eisner returned to executive produce and host yet another edition of this show, The Wonderful World of Disney, for ABC on Sunday nights. This program may not beat 60 Minutes in the ratings, but it has fared well with a mixture of original made for television movies, such as the musical Annie and the drama Ruby Bridges, and broadcasts of Disney features, such as babe and The Princess Diaries. 

Some of Disney's TV syndication efforts also failed to mint gold. Today’s Business was an early morning show that, although it aired initially in half the television markets in the United States, lasted but a few painful months in 1985. The Walt Disney Company pulled out, suffering a $5 million loss.

Eisner had more success with cable TV as he expanded efforts to make the Disney Channel a pay-cable TV power. Using a seemingly infinite set of cross-promotional exploitation opportunities, the Disney Channel began to make money by 1990. By that year, the channel could claim 5 million subscribers (out of a population of some 60 million cable households).

Eisner may have had the most early success in home video. He accomplished this in the Spades by packaging and offering the “classics”  of Disney animation in the expanding home video market. These video revenues provided an immediate boost to the corporate bottom line. In 1986 alone, home video revenues added more than $100 million dollars of pure profit. In October 1987, when  Lady and the Tramp was released on video, the Disney company had more than 2 million orders in hand before it ever shipped a copy. By the late 1980s, Bambi and Cinderella were added to the list of the all-time best sellers on video. Eisner placed Bambi and even Fantasia into “video sell through” so every family could buy and own a copy.  Aladdin and  The Lion King created even more profit and made the Disney operation Hollywood's leader in home video sales.

With all this, Eisner made the Disney balance sheets glow. From mid-1985 through late 1990, the company broke profit records for more than 20 straight quarters. Based on the good times of the 1980s, operating margins and cash flow tripled. It was no wonder that, in order to underscore their thriving new corporate colossus, Eisner and Company president Frank Wells changed the company name from Walt Disney Productions to the Walt Disney Company.

By 199, the Walt Disney Company had become a true corporate power. Specifically, as 1991 began, it ranked in the top 200 of all U.S. corporations in terms of sales and assets, and outstanding 43rd in terms of profits. In terms of its stock value, Disney had grown into a $16 billion company, with mind-boggling sales of $6 billion per annum and profits approaching $1 billion per year. This was a media corporate Giant, of a rank comparable to that of Time Warner or paramount, no marginal enterprise anymore.

It came as no surprise in July 1995 that Disney announced its most important move in television, the takeover of a broadcast television network. What was surprising, however, is that the network chosen by Disney was ABC, then the leading Network, and its parent company, Capital Cities. Additional surprise came from the quiet, unsuspected nature of the deal-making. As the story is reported, Eisner and Capital Cities President Thomas Murphy began their negotiations only days before the final deal was struck–and managed to keep it from reporters. For and announced $19 billion, Disney had suddenly become one of the world's major media conglomerates. A few weeks later, the surprise continued when Michael Ovitz, head of the Creative Artists Agency– who was at that time often referred to as the most powerful man in Hollywood– became president of the new company.

For all his successes, Eisner has been well rewarded. In 1990 surveys of the best-paid corporate executives in the United States, he ranked in the top ten. From 1986 to 1990, he had been paid nearly $100 million for his efforts. In 2000, Eisner received a stock options bonus with nearly $38 million despite the fact that during the previous three years company profits fell by half. The Disney Company hit a publicity Apex in May 1989, when it was revealed that Michael Eisner was the highest-paid executive in the United States for 1988, and more than $40 million.  Michael Eisner must be credited with creating in the Disney Company one of the True Media powerhouses of the late 20th century. However, the dawn of the 21st century proved unkind to isner. During the Summer of 2001, Disney's Blockbuster Pearl Harbor did not do as well as expected at the box office. Around the same time, conservatives attacked Eisner for his liberal policies regarding homosexuals. Then the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon devastated the theme park business.