Dave Hollis, former president of worldwide distribution for Walt Disney Studios, a Christian author, and social media influencer, died at his home in Texas on Feb. 11. He was 47.
Hollis, whose ex-wife Rachel Hollis wrote the bestseller Girl, Wash Your Face, was pronounced dead Sunday at his home in Dripping Springs, a city on the outskirts of Austin, according to Hays County Justice of the Peace Andrew Cable. An autopsy will be performed.
A representative for Hollis’ family said he died peacefully Saturday night at his home outside Austin, Texas, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He had been hospitalized recently for heart problems.
“We are devastated,” she wrote. “I have no words and my heart is too broken to find them. Please wrap the kids in prayers as we try and navigate through the unthinkable.”
Hollis is survived by his four children: Jackson, Sawyer, Ford, and Noah.
Hollis had a 17-year career with Disney, working his way up to become president of the theatrical distribution division. During his tenure as the division’s president from 2011 – 2018, he played a key role in the relaunch of the Star Wars franchise, as well as the Avengers series, Frozen and Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster superhero film Black Panther (2018), according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Under Hollis’s leadership, the studio experienced amazing success at the box office. In 2016, it became the first studio to surpass $7 billion in global ticket sales in just one year.
In 2018, Hollis left Disney to relocate with his family and work alongside his then-wife Rachel as CEO of their company ChicMedia. The parents of four moved from Los Angeles to the Austin area, collaborated on live streams, podcasts, and organized life-affirming conferences. In their podcast, “Rise Together,” they focused on marriage.
When Rachel Hollis announced on Instagram in 2020 that they were getting divorced, she said they had worked “endlessly” over the prior three years to make their marriage work but came to the conclusion that “it is healthier and more respectful for us to choose this as the end of our journey as a married couple.”
Hollis opened up about how his highly-publicized divorce brought him closer to God during a 2021 interview with The Christian Post (CP).
“2020 was the hardest year of my life, outpacing any other year by a factor of 100,” he told CP. “But it was also the best. As I look back, 18 months removed from the hardest things that I’ve ever been through — I don’t want to relive them, but I can sit here today with a wild amount of gratitude for having gone through them, because of the way that it brought me to my knees and drew me closer to God.”
“Telling people that you have faith is something that is easy until you go through really, really hard things,” he said. “I realized how much stronger my faith could be because it had been tested.”
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Hollis went on to write motivational books. In his book Get Out of Your Own Way: A Skeptic’s Guide to Growth and Fulfillment published in 2020, he revealed he had found himself ill-tempered, at odds with his wife, and drinking too much toward the end of his Disney career.
“There is something unbelievably liberating about owning the truth of my experience,” he told The Hollywood Reporter at the time.
Hollis’s book Built Through Courage: Face Your Fears to Live the Life You Were Meant For was released in 2021. He most recently published the children’s book Here’s to Your Dreams.
Motivational author Brendon Burchard paid tribute to Hollis in an Instagram post, calling him “a good man, a loving father, an inspiring teacher, and a dear friend.”
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