Candle Media co-founder and former Disney and TikTok executive Kevin Mayer joins Deadline’s Diana Lodderhose at the Zurich Summit to discuss the rapidly changing entertainment landscape. Mayer reflects on launching Disney+, his time at TikTok, and how Candle Media is combining traditional storytelling with the power of social platforms and creator-led content. He also discusses the rise of YouTube, the future of theatrical versus streaming, and what Hollywood has learned from the creator economy. Mayer shares his perspective on industry consolidation and the future of major media companies, in...
What Kevin Mayer said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Kevin Mayer, co-CEO of Candle Media, reflected on his career across Disney, TikTok, and his current venture. He argued that Disney's success stems from brand-building and quality storytelling, while TikTok's engagement is driven by AI-based recommendation over content quality. Candle Media merges these by taking digitally originated IP, such as Cocomelon, and extending it to traditional media. Mayer highlighted that Candle Media's portfolio generates 10 to 13 billion monthly views, surpassing both MrBeast and the Walt Disney Company on YouTube. He criticized Hollywood's delayed acknowledgment of social media's cultural influence, citing the 2012 Maker Studios acquisition as a missed opportunity. On theatrical release, he argued that distribution methods are not sacred and that studios should let audiences choose. He supported the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger, stating that consolidation is necessary to avoid industry collapse from declining revenues.
Key takeaways
Candle Media's portfolio generates 10 to 13 billion views monthly, three to four times MrBeast's 4 billion.
Cocomelon was the most watched show on Netflix from 2021 to 2024, based on repackaged YouTube episodes.
Disney Plus achieved 10 million subscribers in 24 hours, surpassing the business plan's 5 million first-year target.
Mayer supports the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger, predicting one or two more major consolidations are needed.
Numbers and commitments
Figure
What it refers to
Type
At
60 million
Disney Plus subscribers in 5 years per business plan
11:04Is there a sense when you kind of look back to your time as a studio and as the studios as a whole that there perhaps was a bit of jumping the gun too soon on going straight to streaming rather than holding back for theatrical?
15:14Thoughts on the Paramount–Warner Brothers merger?
Hello. Welcome. My name's Diana Lodderhose, international features editor here at Deadline. I'm in our Zurich Summit studio with Mr. Kevin Mayer. Thank you so much for being here from Candle Media. How are you?
Very much so. It's a beautiful city. The conference is the right size. It's intimate. A lot of good people. A lot of great talk and chatter about what's happening in the industry. It's fabulous.
Okay. Well, that's good. So, I wanted to ask you a little bit — your career trajectory has been quite something. And having had time at Disney, quite a long stint there. And then you were at TikTok for a while.
And then you set up Candle Media. How — I'd love to just get a snapshot of — I mean, I know it's a big overarching question, but how did — like when you kind of look back at that trajectory, how did each one of those sort of inform the next? Like what did you learn from working at behemoths like Disney and TikTok that you can carry through into your business today?
Yeah. Well, at Disney it's all about fairly traditional storytelling and they're the best at it, in my humble opinion. No one does it better than Disney. Disney was also about the power of brands to help consumers make decisions about the entertainment they want to consume, the toys they want to buy, the vacations they want to go on. So, brands — that notion and the strategy of creating a great portfolio of brands was very top of mind at Disney. I was chief strategy officer, so I focused very much on that. So, this notion that brands really matter, that brands can be built, nurtured, and you can create brand deposits by having great product underneath those brands, or you can create brand withdrawals if you do something wrong. And once you damage a brand, it's very hard to build it back up. So, the notion that keeping brands pristine, dynamic, and engaging at Disney is probably one of the foremost parts of the strategy there. You do that through great storytelling under those brands. So, Disney isn't just one brand. It's not Disney. It's Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars. Those are all very important brands, each meaning something different to audiences. So, I kind of learned a lot about that, the power of that relationship that a brand can have with its audience, and the financial power of having brands. And in fact, when I also launched Disney Plus when I was at Disney, the big differentiator and the reason we thought we had a right to compete against already some big incumbents — there was Amazon Prime and Netflix were already streaming — we felt that we could be a late entrant or a medium late entrant because of the power of those brands. And in fact, that really did turn out to be the case. 10 million subscribers in 24 hours. You know, our business plan that Wall Street loved called for 5 million subscribers in a year and 60 million subscribers in 5 years. We did 10 million in 24 hours and 65 million subscribers by the time I left for TikTok in five months. So, power of brands is something I learned. And of course, quality storytelling and the necessity of building brands and then nurturing them and sustaining them.
When I went to TikTok, I found something very different. TikTok isn't about the brands of the actual storytelling. In fact, there's very little storytelling on TikTok. TikTok's all about AI-driven recommendation. Very, very precise recommendation. And that's the value that people see. The engaging nature of that experience is all because of that recommendation-driven AI engine that they have. So, TikTok can detect passively with the weakest signals exactly what an audience member wants and personalize a stream of pretty low-quality stuff, but happens to exactly and precisely conform to what that person wants to see at that moment. So, it's super engaging. So, there was a difference. Quality didn't matter so much. Just getting the right thing in front of the right person at the right time mattered. Two opposite ends of the spectrum. So, Candle Media is meant to kind of marry the two things, taking social media perspectives, marrying it with traditional storytelling, and creating a flywheel around that.
How does that work? Like explain that kind of how when you say that you're marrying those two through Candle, like what are some sort of concrete examples of how you are kind of —
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Mayer, K. (2026, September 30). Kevin Mayer on Disney+, TikTok, Netflix & the Future of Entertainment [Interview transcript]. Deadline Hollywood. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2976108/
MLA
Kevin Mayer. "Kevin Mayer on Disney+, TikTok, Netflix & the Future of Entertainment." Deadline Hollywood, 30 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2976108/.
BibTeX
@misc{mayer2026_2976108,
author = {Kevin Mayer},
title = {Kevin Mayer on Disney+, TikTok, Netflix \& the Future of Entertainment},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Deadline Hollywood. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2976108/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
