Alan Horn, Walt Disney Studios chairman: the Jedi-in-chief

A lan Horn is showing me how to deliver the maximum amount of force in a Taekwondo strike. “Force equals mass times acceleration,” he says, folding his fingers into a fist and explaining that power should be concentrated in the knuckles of his fore and middle finger.

Affable and easy-going, he does not seem to be the sort of person who could break hard objects with his bare hands but the Walt Disney Studios chairman is a black belt in the discipline and used to have his own Taekwondo school in Los Angeles. His skills helped launch his entertainment career when, in his final interview with the Hollywood mogul Jerry Perenchio in 1973 he was asked if he could punch a wall (he did, putting a dent in it — and getting the job).

It seems improbable that The Force Awakens will be anything other than a massive hit but Mr Horn is keen to cool expectations. We mention films such as Avatar, which grossed $2.8bn worldwide, Titanic, which made $2.2bn, and this summer’s hit Jurassic World, which grossed close to $1.7bn. Surely the new Star Wars will do as well? “I don’t know,” he says, not wanting to be drawn. But he says the movie, which was directed by JJ Abrams, is “terrific, a wonderful picture”.

Mr Horn has spent almost two decades at Hollywood’s summit, first as one of the top two executives at Warner Brothers, where he brought the Harry Potter and Dark Knight films to the screen, among other blockbuster hits. Since 2012 he has been chairman of Walt Disney Studios, where he is responsible for overseeing and releasing films from all of the company’s theatrical labels, including Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm.

His Hollywood career almost did not happen. He grew up in Long Island and initially studied electrical engineering — but hated it. He recalls a blunt professor saying: “You must be good at something — although nothing comes to mind.”

He eventually ditched engineering for economics and, for a time, thought about a career in the US Air Force — he had earned his pilot’s licence through the reserve officer training programming — but an eye problem put paid to that. After graduating he went to Harvard Business School and then landed a job with Procter & Gamble, working on soap brands.

He enjoyed his time at P&G but discovered it was not a great fit. “I got off of the elevator one day and sat down at my desk and all the pictures on my desk of my mom and dad, my brother, my sister were all different human beings. I realised I had gotten off on the wrong floor. I thought: I don’t know about this.”

Jerry Perenchio and Norman Lear, the fabled producer of long-running television hits like All in the Family and The Jeffersons, got him into the entertainment industry. He remains close to both men and clearly reveres them, referring to them as Mr Perenchio and Mr Lear. They saw his lack of familiarity with Hollywood as an attraction. “They didn’t want a native. They wanted someone from outside the business.”

In the years that followed he worked for 20th Century Fox and co-founded Castle Rock Entertainment with the director Rob Reiner. The company released films such as When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men and The Shawshank Redemption but scored its biggest hit with the Seinfeld television series.

Castle Rock was eventually acquired by Ted Turner, the media mogul who started CNN and whose company was later bought by Time Warner. That was Mr Horn’s route into the Warner Brothers studio.

Even without the Harry Potter series, the hits poured out of Warner Bros: sequels to The Matrix, The Hangover movies, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, 300, the Ocean’s Eleven series. “We had a good run,” he says.

He left Warner Bros in 2011 at the age of 68 after he was asked to step aside for succession planning reasons, as the studio promoted a new, younger team. Leaving the studio was “painful”, he admits. But within a year he had popped up at Disney.

At the time of his arrival, the company’s movie studio was not in the best of health. Its non-animated output was not setting the box office alight — Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 was one low point — and with the acquisitions of Marvel Studios and, later, Lucasfilm to be integrated and managed, the company needed an experienced hand at the tiller.

Mr Horn was the man Disney turned to. The pitch from Bob Iger, CEO of the broader Walt Disney group, was simple, Mr Horn says. “It was: ‘I need someone to oversee and co-ordinate the product and these different entities . . . someone needs to be the connective tissue.”

He pays credit to the creative talents at Pixar, Lucasfilm and Marvel, which has blazed a trail at the box office with its interconnected “universe” of films, such as the Iron Man series, Avengers films and Guardians of the Galaxy.

“People said to me when I came in: what are your plans for Marvel? I said: I plan to bring them coffee. And it’s not false modesty. These people have earned the right to enjoy tremendous autonomy.”

This is not to say his job is to rubber stamp whatever comes his way: he says he offers notes, guidance and suggestions. “Everyone benefits from fresh eyes and objectivity.”

I wonder how an economics graduate who worked in branding picked up those skills and he mentions his break with Norman Lear. “I was immersed in television and it turned out to be a great training ground. The process by which one analyses a $200m picture is not all that much different from the process by which one analyses a $20m picture or a $2m television episode.”

Disney has released plenty of hits — Cinderella and Inside Out among them — since his arrival three years ago. But it has not all been plain sailing. Disney will lose money on Tomorrowland , starring George Clooney, which underwhelmed at the box office this year. The movie “failed on my watch”, he says sadly.

The success of other movies in Disney’s portfolio this year means any losses from Tomorrowland will be absorbed. Disney releases more “tent-pole” movies — expensive blockbusters that can generate big profits — than his former employer.

At Warner, he explains, “we clawed our way up to four a year”. At Disney, “we have eight tent poles for fiscal year 2016 . . . nobody has that.”

On the slate next year are a live-action reimagining of The Jungle Book from Iron Man director Jon Favreau — with Idris Elba voicing Shere Khan — and a new version of the 1970s Disney film Pete’s Dragon.

Audiences are the only real judge of success in Hollywood. How can companies prosper in what is a notoriously difficult industry?

He mentions a documentary he saw a while ago about a perfectionist sushi chef, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and says he urged his creative team to watch it.

“It is a study in the relentless pursuit of excellence,” he says, adding that its tenets could easily apply to Hollywood. “What can you do with the screenplay, [or] with the dailies you saw the night before? With the wardrobe design? Costumes? What can we do to make this film better?”

“John Lasseter (the Pixar co-founder — and Disney’s chief creative officer) has an expression that I’ve adopted for myself,” he adds. “Quality is the best business plan. I just love that.”

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