IV.

New Leadership

After Disney’s death the film business was revived and expanded by Ron Miller and then Michael Eisner, by moving into adult feature production. Eisner recruited film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg from Paramount and subsequent Disney films such as Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989), and Pretty Woman (1990) were all extremely successful at the box office. The studio’s cartoon features also improved artistically and commercially with The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991, the first animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture), and Aladdin (1992).

The Disney theme park concept continued to expand, including Disneyland, introduced in Japan in 1983, and Euro Disneyland (now Disneyland Paris) outside Paris, which opened in 1992.