Strategic Moves Ahead: Disney’s $60B Vision for Expanding Theme Park Experiences
By Movieguide® Contributor
Disney’s Chairman of Experiences, Josh D’Amaro, will head the company’s $60 billion theme park and cruise investment scheme over the next ten years.
His next moves must be carefully planned if Disney is going to make a return on its gigantic investment.
“At his disposal is a wealth of unexploited IP (at least in parks and cruise lines) and more than 1,000 acres of land available for development across the company’s six resorts,” The Hollywood Reporter said.
“We will have enough room to build the equivalent of another Disneyland Park. And so then you start to think about, ‘Well what can we do here?’ ” D’Amaro said. “We haven’t told anything, any stories on Wakanda. We haven’t told any stories on FROZEN, although it’s a 10-year old franchise. You think about franchises like COCO and ENCANTO. We almost have an endless stream of stories that we can tell.”
Seventy percent of the investment will be for parks and cruise line experiences. The rest will be for infrastructure, maintenance and tech-related expenses. A handful of attractions are scheduled to open next year.
“As Kevin Feige in Marvel Studios is thinking about his new storylines, my team from consumer products is in when they’re writing those new episodes,” D’Amaro said.
“Imagineers on my team are in with Kevin and his team thinking about those characters and how they might come to life inside of our theme parks, and what an attraction might be. So if you’re looking at some of the recent releases that Kevin and the Marvel team have had, almost day-and-date with those releases, the characters find their way into the theme parks,” he said.
Movieguide® reported that stocks fell when Disney announced the investment plan last year:
Investors responded negatively to the news that Disney plans to double its spending on theme parks, raising its investment to $60 billion over the next 10 years.
“We’re incredibly mindful of the financial underpinning of the company, the need to continue to grow in terms of bottom line, the need to invest wisely so that we’re increasing the returns on invested capital, and the need to maintain a balance sheet, for a variety of reasons,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger….
“We have an ambitious growth story that is supported by a proven track record and a bold vision for the future of our Parks business,” added Experiences and Products Chairman Josh D’Amaro.
Carissa Baker, assistant professor of theme park and attraction management at the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management, explained why Disney decided to invest such a large sum in its customer experiences.
“When you consider other elements of Disney’s business, those theme parks, they’ve shown themselves to be proven winners,” she said. “There’s no doubt that they have stayed very competitive in the film space and the TV space, but they’ve always led the theme park sector.”
Neil Begley, a senior analyst at Moody’s, says a dip in the economy could throw a wrench in the plan. Competition from Comcast’s NBCUniversal will also factor in.
“Comcast has been investing a lot into their theme parks and getting a strong return on them. And so that kind of forces everybody to have to up their game,” Begley said.
He added that Disney and Universal are currently “much closer competitively than they ever were.”
An NBCUniversal Epic Universe park in Orlando will open next year. It’s slated to feature five lands: Super Nintendo World; The Wizarding World of Harry Potter; How to Train Your Dragon; Dark Universe, a division that features Dr. Victoria Frankenstein’s monstrous experiments; and Celestial Park—gardens with water fixtures and mythological-inspired architecture.
“Like Disney, Universal also reported reaching record results for its theme parks, with its unit achieving its highest adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization on record of $3.3 billion in 2023, up 25 percent from the preceding year,” The Hollywood Reporter said.
Iger said earlier this month that Disney has known about Universal’s plan for over a decade.
“In that time, [Disney has] staggered the launch of several attractions in Florida to bring in new attendees, including Pandora: The World of Avatar at Animal Kingdom, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, and the renovation of EPCOT, with new rides around Ratatouille and Moana,” the Hollywood Reporter said.
“We’re always aware of what’s happening around us,” D’Amaro said. “But I think what’s kept Disney Experiences above and beyond anyone else’s [is that] we’re always looking forward. We’re always thinking about technology in a different way than the competitive set. We’re always thinking about how to immerse guests into stories in a completely different way.”
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