Entertainment giant The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS)’s shares are down by 9% over the past year and by 3.6% year-to-date. One aspect of the firm that Cramer regularly discusses is its cruise ship business. For instance, in August 2025, the CNBC TV host predicted that The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) would make “a lot of money” with its cruise ship business. As the firm’s new CEO previously ran its cruise business, naturally, Cramer had a lot to say about The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) on August 17th:
“I have been a big believer in Josh [D’Amaro]. First, congratulations to Chris Berman, ESPN legend. . .it’s a good example of what, they have this ESPN and it’s been, somehow been an albatross. I think that’s ridiculous. They have all this great film they do these great things. Now Josh ran the cruise ships, if they could double the cruise ships then the numbers would go up big. James Gorman put them in a terrific situation in the interim. Do I want to own Disney? We owned it, it’s very hard to own that stock because it’s kept down by the cohort. The cohort is so miserable that you keep thinking, I don’t want to get ahead of myself here because oh man, everybody else is doing terribly.”
The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) is in the unique position in the media and entertainment industry since it owns both legacy networks and has set up formidable digital platforms as well. Consequently, the debate for the firm also covers these facets. On the bullish front, The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS)’s unified streaming platforms are scaling up nicely. During its fiscal third quarter, the firm streaming revenue grew by 11% to $5.53 billion, as it added that streaming achieved a 13% operating margin. Additionally, and as Cramer loves to talk about, the firm’s Experiences division, which covers the cruise business, is also performing well. Experiences revenue jumped by 10% to a record $9.97 billion. As a cherry on top, Toy Story 5 also crossed $1 billion at the global box office and allowed The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) to fire on multiple cylinders.
Yet, overall revenue in Q2 missed analyst estimates and as the firm does not provide a streaming revenue breakdown, it is difficult to determine whether the growth was a result of price increases or subscriber growth. Additionally, while the Experiences division remains a standout, its revenue is not secular and leads to concerns of causing a downturn for the entire business should The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) come to rely on it too much. Not to mention, Experiences is also a capital intensive business which ends up affecting cash flows and inflation and discounting cutting operating margins to below 24% could lead to weakness. To sum it up, while The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) is creating tailwinds from streaming and experiences, cyclicality for parks and continued troubles with linear offerings can create headwinds. Considering this, perhaps Cramer believes that increase cruise revenue could hedge against parks’ cyclicality.
On the hedge fund front, 119 out of the 1,022 funds part of Insider Monkey’s database had held a stake in The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) which was a slight jump over Q4’s figure of 113 funds out of 1,041. In Q2, Viking Global cut its stake by 47% to $688 million and Arrowstreet Capital cut its stake by 22% to $1 billion. Short interest as a percentage of float is negligible at 1.13% while the forward P/E of 14.45 is between CMCSA’s 7.73 and NFLX’s 25.25.
While Insider Monkey acknowledges the risk and potential of DIS as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than DIS that has 100x upside potential, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None.
