Senior executives at Disney reportedly want the company to acquire Epic Games and are waiting for the right moment to make it happen. This comes weeks after Epic laid off over 1,000 employees and pulled three ‘Fortnite‘ game modes, including Rocket Racing, Ballistic, and Festival Battle Stage, following what the company called a downturn in ‘Fortnite‘ engagement. Disney already owns a $1.5 billion stake in Epic that it took out in February 2025, and this would not be a cold approach.
But the company is not fully aligned with the idea. Tech reporter Alex Heath said on The Town with Matt Belloni that while some Disney executives are pushing hard for the acquisition, others inside the company think it is a bad idea. The interest goes beyond Fortnite, too, because Epic also owns Unreal Engine, which Disney has been using heavily across its film and television production for years.
Alex Heath Claims Disney Executives Are Split On Buying Epic Games
Heath was blunt about what he had heard. “I know for a fact there are senior executives in Disney who want them to buy Epic and are just waiting for that moment,” he said on the podcast, and then added that “there are others who think it is a bad idea.”
So the company is not on the same page about this. But the fact that people inside Disney are actively disagreeing about it tells you it has gone past the hypothetical stage. Former Disney executive Kevin Mayer backed up the interest from a different angle. He said the current CEO “has a big investment in Epic Games” and called Epic “a great addition to The Walt Disney Company’s asset base.”
New Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro also mentioned Epic during a recent shareholder address, which suggests the conversation is happening at the highest levels and not just in background meetings.
The problem for Disney is Tim Sweeney. Sweeney founded Epic Games, and he is the original author of Unreal Engine. He still holds the majority of shares in the company. Chinese conglomerate Tencent owns roughly 80 percent of the remaining half, but Sweeney’s stake gives him the power to make decisions about the company on his own.
Heath pointed out that Sweeney seems like the kind of person who wants his company to outlast him and still has plenty of plans for where to take it. But Heath also said that if Sweeney ever does step away, then Disney “would be the most natural home for it.” So the interest is real, but the timing depends entirely on one person.
Disney Wants Unreal Engine As Much As It Wants ‘Fortnite’ Itself
The acquisition talk is not just about ‘Fortnite‘ skins and battle passes. Unreal Engine has been a core part of Disney’s production pipeline for years, and Heath specifically mentioned that it has been “a huge part of production for everything from Mandalorian to a ton of shows.”
Disney was also a billion-dollar investor behind OpenAI’s Sora, an advanced video generation platform, which announced it was shutting down in late March 2026. Sora is gone now. Unreal Engine is not going anywhere. If Disney buys Epic, they get both the game and the production tool in one deal.
On the ‘Fortnite‘ side, the relationship between the two companies is already deep. ‘Star Wars‘ content has been in ‘Fortnite‘ for years, and Disney properties like ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ ‘The Incredibles,’ ‘Nightmare Before Christmas,’ and Disney Villains have all had crossover events in the game. If Disney owned Epic outright, it would not need to license their characters into Fortnite through collab deals anymore. They would just own the game in which those characters appear.
The layoffs do complicate things, though. Heath said he believes Epic “overhired” during the 2020 pandemic and that the cuts are part of an industry-wide pullback that has hit studios everywhere, not just Epic.
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Belloni pushed back and asked whether buying a company that just let go of over a thousand employees would look good, but also agreed that the interest from Disney’s side is real. Whether any of this turns into an actual offer depends on Sweeney. And Sweeney has not given anyone a reason to think he wants out.
