30 December 2016 Last updated at 17:39 GMT
In the last decade alone they've bought up Pixar, Marvel and Lucas Films which owned The Star Wars empire - leading to suggestions that they are now so powerful that they have colonised childhoods.
Children's author Michael Rosen says Disney can reinvent itself "like the Royal Family".
He told Radio 4's The World at One that Disney has been successful at selling itself by doing things "in an ambivalent way".
Disney has become the first film studio to take $7bn (Â£5.7bn) in global ticket sales for 2016.