As part of its 100-year celebration, Disney is putting some of its most beloved films back in theaters.
Starting next month with Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, Disney will re-release eight of its most beloved films through the end of October at select movie theaters.
Toy Story, Frozen, Beauty and the Beast, The Incredibles, Coco, The Lion King and Moana will round out the eight-film series, respectively.
Disney doesn’t re-release its films in theaters often like it did in the 20th century, so this should give Disney fans a great opportunity to relive some classics on the big screen.
The Disney Genie+ service at Walt Disney World will change to park-specific pricing starting Tuesday, June 27, 2023.
The Details
When the change goes into effect, guests will now have a choice of purchasing a multi-park Genie+ or Genie+ good for a specific park.
For instance, on a given day, the multi-park option might be priced at $27. But the guest could also choice to purchase Genie+ for just Magic Kingdom for $27 per person, or $24 per guest Disney’s Hollywood Studios, $18 per guest for EPCOT, or $16 per guest for Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
Plus, if the multi-park option is sold out, guests still can purchase Genie+ for an individual park, if it’s still available.
The variable pricing for Genie+, which changed last fall to accommodate peak periods, will also be in effect, so the price could change on a daily basis. Check with the My Disney Experience app for that day’s prices.
Disney says the change will allow it to offer Genie+ for longer periods during busy times like holidays, when the service can sell out for the day.
One thing that hasn’t changed is that Genie+ will still only be available to purchase on the day of a guest visits.
In May, Disney announced they were working on ways to allow guests to pre-purchase Genie+ at Walt Disney World, but they have not implemented anything yet.
No changes for Disney Genie+ at the Disneyland Resort have been announced at this time.
The 1994 stage musical – an adaptation of the hit 1991 animated movie, based on Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont’s fairytale – was Disney Theatrical Productions’ (DTP) first full-length stage show.
The collective response to the film had marvelled at the integrity of its musical storytelling; New York Times sent theatre critic Frank Rich to review the movie, who called it, “The best Broadway musical score of 1991”. Transferring it to actual Broadway seemed like a logical move, albeit a risky one – but after some hesitation, Disney took the plunge.
Disney created DTP, bought the dilapidated New Amsterdam theatre on 42nd Street and facilitated, for better or worse, the tourist-friendly clean-up of once gritty Times Square. The theatre required extensive restoration and it wasn’t ready in time for Beauty and the Beast, but became the first home of the Lion King on Broadway, which is still open (now in a different theatre) and currently ranked as its third-longest running musical.
DTP is now a Broadway force, nominated for 62 Tony Awards and winning 20. But what of the story that started it all? Does it have anything left to offer on stage?
Absolutely. The musical’s original creative team, including director/choreographer Matt West, have returned to refresh and expand the production, smoothing out its dated effects and perking up its book, look, and feel.
Gareth Jacobs, Hayley Martin, Rohan Browne, Jayde Westaby and Alana Tranter in Beauty and The Beast. Photograph: Daniel Boud
Stanley A Meyer’s scenic design is all storybook charm with a touch of rococo, a pastoral playfulness united by Alan Menken’s music with its gorgeous orchestration and full-bodied fantasy. The music also eases the transition between Howard Ashman’s original lyrics and Tim Rice’s additions, which are more bluntly comic and direct. Buoyed up by the score, the new Australian cast glides through the story (the book is by Linda Woolverton, who penned the film script).
Shubshri Kandiah plays her third princess here as Belle (previously she starred as Princess Jasmine in the Australian tour of Aladdin, and she’s played Cinderella twice in as many years, first the Rodgers and Hammerstein version for Opera Australia and then Sondheim’s more ambivalent Cinderella in Belvoir’s Into the Woods), and this is her best fit yet: she moves effortlessly, effervescently, from a bookish dreamy loner into someone who is finally able to connect with others.
Brendan Xavier is the Beast (he recently took over the Kristoff role in the Australian tour of Frozen), and they’re an excellent pair. While his character swings between the broadly silly-but-sweet and the surprisingly dark (If I Can’t Love Her, the Menken-Rice number penned for the stage, is a deeply serious cri de cœur that closes the first act), the two approaches finally arrive at something that feels real.
Be Our Guest is ‘a feast of Busby Berkeley-style shape-making, tap, and full ensemble spectacle.’ Photograph: Daniel Boud
This cast is committed, refreshingly, to character. Understudy Jackson Head played the role of Gaston on opening night, and the part felt firmly realised, finding a goofier edge to the chauvinist villain. As Lumière, Cogsworth and Mrs Potts – the Beast’s household staff transformed into objects – Rohan Browne, Gareth Jacobs, and Jayde Westaby are instantly lovable; you understand precisely why Belle opens her heart to them. Alana Tranter’s Madame is an essential comic addition, and Hayley Martin puts her dance chops on full display as maid turned feather-duster Babette, who along with Browne nearly runs off with the show in the sumptuous Be Our Guest, now a feast of Busby Berkeley-style shape-making, tap, and full ensemble spectacle.
But it is the show’s love story, and its journey of its two central characters to find, feel, and express their love for each other, that soars above everything else and settles in the heart. Menken’s music (the musical direction here is by Luke Hunter), with its blossoming refrains and reprises, guides the characters to each other through melody. Their growing connection, and the Beast’s attempts to recommit to and rediscover his humanity, are sincerely moving.
‘The show’s love story soars and settles in the heart.’ Photograph: Daniel Boud
Of course the biggest gift to the story – and the biggest gift to us – has always been the lyrics of Howard Ashman.
When Ashman began working on Beauty and the Beast, he was already sick. Disney set up a production unit near his home in New York so he could continue to work while receiving care for HIV/Aids. He died eight months before the film was released, and his music contains a glimpse at what musical theatre might have looked like and how it might have evolved had he lived: classical, beautiful phrasing paired with literary lyrics driven by emotion, favouring clarity over cleverness but always in possession of real intelligence.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the devastating, hopeful, eternal nature of the title song, which might be one of the greatest love poems ever told by a kindly teapot. Through Beauty and the Beast, Ashman gave Mrs Potts the truth of the entire story, and maybe the truth of everything, too. It says love is a lasting, powerful force – bigger than us, but also deeply human, full of quirks and flaws and losses and joys.
Ashman, and this musical, leave us with a reminder that love endures everywhere, all the time, even when we think it may be lost to us. It’s there ever just the same. Ever a surprise.
Beauty and the Beast runs at Sydney’s Capitol theatre until 5 November
The Walt Disney Company’s Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy participates in a panel discussion during the annual Milken Institute Global Conference at The Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, April 29, 2019.
Michael Kovac | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Christine McCarthy, Disney’s chief financial officer, will step down from that role, the entertainment giant said Thursday.
She will take a family medical leave of absence, and during that time, she will continue as a strategic advisor to Disney, the company said. McCarthy will also help find a long-term successor, Disney added. Veteran Disney executive Kevin Lansberry, who currently works as finance chief for Disney’s parks business, will become the company’s interim CFO effective July 1.
“I am immensely grateful for the opportunity Bob provided me to serve as CFO of this iconic company and am proud of the work my talented team has done to position Disney to capitalize on the business possibilities that lie ahead,” McCarthy said in the news release announcing her departure.
McCarthy, who started with Disney in 2000 and became CFO in 2015, leaves as Disney undergoes a broad restructuring during Bob Iger’s second tenure as CEO. The company has targeted 7,000 job cuts during several rounds of layoffs this year.
Disney has also contended with a tougher ad market for media companies and struggled to set itself apart in a crowded streaming space. In its fiscal second quarter, Disney reported operating losses of $659 million for its direct-to-consumer segment.
During McCarthy’s tenure, Disney’s streaming spending skyrocketed, and free cash flow fell. For a while, that was fine. Disney’s stock got a bump as the number of Disney+ subscribers soared. But when the balloon popped on streaming valuations in 2022, she needed to change strategies. That is still a work in progress.
McCarthy also emerged as a pivotal figure during last year’s upheaval at Disney, which saw Iger return to replace his successor as CEO, Bob Chapek. During Chapek’s tenure, she moved toward his inner circle, only to reportedly turn on him, which proved to be the final straw for the former chief executive.
But Iger has loyalists at that company, and McCarthy’s move toward Chapek showed she wasn’t in that camp. So, she never had the same status internally as being trusted by Iger as others, according to people familiar with the matter.
Iger struck a positive tone about McCarthy in Thursday’s announcement, however.
“Among her many contributions to the company, one of the things I admire most about Christine is the generous mentorship she has provided to so many of her colleagues over the years, including countless women,” Iger said in the news release. “She has opened doors, created opportunities, and served as a role model for women at every level of business — not just at Disney, but around the world.”
Disney is anxious for a win at the box office with Elemental, the first animation from its powerhouse Pixar studio to be released into cinemas post-COVID.
The last four Pixar films were funnelled into the loss-making Disney+ channel, and the great hope is that the US$200 million spectacular will get the Pixar audience – which Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter describes as “everybody” – back into theatres.
Ember (left) voiced by Leah Lewis and Wade, voiced by Mamoudou Athie in a scene from “Elemental.”CREDIT:DISNEY/PIXAR VIA AP
The Elemental team admitted to being “very tense” at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film was launched as the festival’s closing-night gala. Reviews were mixed, but are less important than the great unknown: whether family audiences are prepared to pay for tickets again. The film opens in Australia on Thursday.
“You just have to hold on and see how things go,” says Docter. “We’re trying to diversify as much as we can – we’re doing a couple of streaming shows – but we’re continuing to go in mainly for what are hopefully everyone-can-enjoy kind of films in theatres.”
Disney bought Pixar, which made its mark with game-changing animations such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, in 2006 for US$7.4 billion. As the largest entertainment company in the world, the Disney stable – which also includes Marvel and Star Wars – suffered a severe financial squeeze over lockdown, when the closure of cinemas and its Disney World parks coincided with heavy losses on its newly established streaming service, Disney+.
By the end of last year, the company’s market value had slumped 40 per cent. It is currently restructuring, with around 7000 jobs cut.
Pixar itself has been regularly mourned as in decline since 2010, when the string of inventive originals that included Wall-E and Ratatouille was overtaken by a series of lacklustre sequels to previous hits. Toy Story 3 (2010) closed a brilliant trilogy, but the studio came back in 2019 with Toy Story 4, panned by fans.
There were mild disappointments, such as Pixar’s entry to the Disney princess charts, Brave (2012) and one-off flops – The Good Dinosaur (2015). The same year, they had one notable success – Docter’s own Inside Out, which won an Oscar as best animation – and some of the sequels, notably Incredibles 2, Finding Dory and Toy Story 4, made over a billion dollars at the box office. The cutting edge that defined Pixar, however, was now agreed by fans online to have become very blunt.
During lockdown, ironically, they were seen as having a return to form with Luca, Turning Red and Soul, the last of which scooped the animation Oscar in 2020. All these film went straight to Disney+, however, so there is no box office measure of their success. “At the time they said Soul was a huge success, but then they adjusted – because they were still working out how stuff works, you know?” says Docter.
“How do you judge success on streaming? At the box office you know you made X dollars, but in streaming is it new subscribers, is it the number of hours or is it the number of individuals watching? They’re doing their best, obviously, but it’s kind of a whole new frontier for entertainment.”
Elemental is an original idea from director Peter Sohn, set in a world inhabited by “people” made of water, air, earth and fire. The Fire people are immigrants living on the edge of a city dominated by Water people that, apart from its barrages and canals, looks very much like New York. Fire girl Ember falls in love with Water boy Wade. Sohn is the son of Korean immigrants.
From left: Elemental Producer Jim Morris, Vincent Lacoste, Adele Exarchopoulos, director Peter Sohn, producer Denise Ream, Creative Director of Pixar Studios Pete Docter, Leah Lewis, and Mamoudou Athie at the closing premiere of ‘Elemental’ in Cannes in May.CREDIT:JOEL C RYAN/INVISION/AP
“I just did these drawings of fire and water; I was just always doodling,” he says. “And there was some interesting tension from putting them together that reminded me of my relationship with my wife, who wasn’t Korean. I got a lot of guilt from my parents (about that). My grandmother’s dying words were literally ‘marry a Korean’!”
Seven years in the making, partly due to the technical challenges of having characters who are constantly in flames or else slurping around like human balloons, Elemental’s beginnings long predate COVID. Nevertheless, the sentimental story feels tailored to an uncertain market. Is trailblazing Pixar playing it safe? Docter, a three-time Oscar winner, sighs heavily at this.
“I would love to see us continue to be as cutting-edge as we possibly can,” he says finally. “It does feel, post-COVID, that audiences have shifted a little. I don’t think anybody’s quite figured out exactly what that means, but attention spans have changed. It’s hard for people to sit and watch something for an hour and a half without reading their phones. I’m not sure what the answer to that is, except to say that good storytelling is good storytelling. I don’t think I can make decisions based on what I think someone may or may not like. I’ve got to just judge it the same way I’ve always done. Does it speak to me and the other people I work with?”
The Pixar approach doesn’t vary; it’s always personal. “I think what we’re trying to do is tap down into the thing we found interesting as kids. Sitting, playing with your cars. Thinking about monsters being in your closet or toys coming to life when you’re not in the room. I remember staring at candles or playing with water and just being fascinated by the elements. So when Pete Sohn said ‘what if they were characters who could move?’ I was immediately thinking ‘wow, how would a fire person eat? What kind of car would they drive? How would they wear clothes, wouldn’t they just burn up?’ So that was the start, then seeing where all that goes.”
In a post on the “True Unpopular Opinion” subreddit, u/turlockmike shared their experience taking their kids to Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom for the first time since their own childhood family vacation.
“Adults who visit Disney World without kids are ruining it,” the Guest argued. “When I was a kid growing up in the 90s, my parents took us to disney world, it was a lot of fun, we got to ride all the rides we wanted, see everything, stay at a disney hotel and it was affordable for our modest income. 2 years ago, we took our kids. I make twice as much as my dad did back then and the disney hotels were insanely priced, couldn’t afford it.”
Credit: Disney
The family got a nice place to stay off-property, but were miserable at the Disney Parks.
“It was basically all adults everywhere,” they recalled. “The rides that were for the youngest kids were basically empty, but any ride that appealed to adults had insanely long lines, like 3 hours or more. We didn’t get to ride any of the cool new rides other than the few we could get a fastpass (or genie pass, not sure what it’s called).”
“Disney world and disney land are for kids,” the Guest concluded. “Anyone over 21 visiting that isn’t on their honeymoon or with their kids is making the place miserable. There are way more fun things to do, go do those and leave Disney alone.”
While a few dozen upvoted the Guest’s post in agreement, most fired back.
Credit: Disney
“Disney World is actually for anyone who can afford a ticket, which 99% of the time, is adults,” u/mczmczmcz said. “No amusement park could exist if it were literally for children.”
“Fun fact: a lot of us didn’t have parents who could afford Disney World as kids so people that go as adults are just making up for lost time,” u/TheSnappleGhost agreed.
“Imagine being so entitled that you think having kids gives you the right to dictate where other people go on vacation,” u/PWcrash wrote. “All because you don’t want to deal with impatient kids waiting in long lines at surprise surprise…DISNEY! I would LOVE if there were more adults only spaces or at least spaces that don’t allow kids under the age of 6 but we all can’t get what we want.”
Last week Disney laid off 75 employees from animation studio Pixar, and among those affected were some long-time, senior personnel. That includes Angus MacLane, director of Lightyear (who had been there for 26 years) and producer Galyn Susman, famous for being the person who “saved” Toy Story 2.
As has been recounted numerous times over the decades — in perhaps the most detail in this 2012 TNW story — during the production of Toy Story 2 back in the late 90s, an animator cleaning up some files one day accidentally deleted most of the team’s two years of work on the film.
Not to worry! They had backup tapes — yeah, tapes, remember this was 1998 — and quickly found that while some of their most recent animation work had been lost, that was only around a week’s delay. An inconvenience, but for a movie that was taking years to produce, not a huge problem.
Or so they thought. The more the team began working with the data saved on the backups, the more problems they ran into. Turns out that the backup tapes had suffered issues of their own — they had quietly filled up months back and had been erasing old data with new saves every time they backed up — and so the restored animation wasn’t working either.
“That work is definitely wasted, because it’s on top of an unreliable restoral,” recalls Jacob. “Now sadly, what’s happened is that there is zero confidence in any solution, because the restoral is bad, the work on it is bad, the deletion was horrible, and the backup tapes are busted.”
“All possible directions to move are broken and, maybe worse. We don’t quite understand how they’re broken. If only 10 per cent of the show is not on the tape, which 10 per cent? I don’t know.”
“That was the big meeting, in the conference room back in Bugville (Pixar’s corporate complex). All the big brains in the studio are like, “Uh, I don’t know. Oh my God!”
Amidst the doom, one person had an idea. Supervising Technical Director Gayle Susman, who had recently had a child, had been doing a lot of work from home and had her own backups.
“She and I just stood up and walked out, back to her Volvo, drove across the bridge, got the machine, got some blankets, I hugged it with seatbelts, across the back seat. Drove at like 35 with blinking lights on, hoping to get a police escort. No cops saw us, so it didn’t help us.”
At that point, the Volvo had become a $US100M machine, as the entirety of the team’s efforts so far on the project were ensconced on its drives.
They made it back to Richmond in safety. “Eight people met us with a plywood sheet out in the parking lot and, like a sedan carrying the Pharaoh, walked it into the machine room.”
And it worked! The data took a ton of work to reintegrate with the whole team, but they eventually got back up to speed, and the movie was saved. For a time, at least; while Susman, her backups and her Volvo have long been the stars of the story, it’s not as widely reported that not long afterwards, Pixar’s leadership hated the movie so much that loads of it had to be scrapped and redone anyway in a hellish, months-long crunch that may have resulted in a pretty great movie, but also in a huge physical and emotional toll on Pixar’s workers that left “a full third of the staff” with RSI and instances like the time an animator “had forgotten to drop his child off at daycare one morning and, in a mental haze, forgot the baby in the back seat of his car in the parking lot”.
Fast forward to 2023, and as part of wider layoffs at Disney — who aren’t just cutting staff, but TV shows as well — Susman is now gone, alongside Lightyear director MacLane and Pixar’s vice president of worldwide publicity Michael Agulnek. The Reuters story announcing the layoffs sure does paint a picture of their dismissals coming as a result of not just Lightyear’s poor (by major Pixar movie standards) box office performance but of Disney being pissed off that “Lightyear could not be shown in 14 Middle Eastern and Asian countries because of its depiction of a same-sex relationship”, which “had an impact on its box office performance.”
The planned closure of Galactic Starcruiser, an immersive role-playing attraction, comes as Disney seeks to cut overall costs by more than $5 billion.
After spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build an immersive “Star Wars”-themed hotel at Walt Disney World, Disney said on Thursday that, amid sweeping corporate cost-cutting, it would close the underperforming attraction in September, only about 18 months after it opened.
The attraction, called Galactic Starcruiser, was marketed as part luxury hotel, part theme park ride, part role-playing game.
Guests are welcomed aboard a 275-year-old space liner and take a celestial voyage on which they might be asked to deliver a secret message, head to the engine room to help repair a fuel valve, or participate in lightsaber training.
Disney said the hotel’s “final voyage” would take place Sept. 28 to 30. Guests who had already booked the hotel after September will be contacted to discuss options to modify their plans, the company said, and new bookings were being paused to prioritize those guests.
All visits are two-night stays with a starting cost of more than $4,800 for two people and around $6,000 for a family of four. For authenticity, the 100 cabins at the Florida hotel have no windows. Instead, stars, planets and asteroid showers are shown on video screens.
The announcement came as Disney pulled the plug on plans to build a $1 billion office complex in Orlando, a decision said to be influenced by the company’s feud with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. It was also not long after Robert A. Iger, in his return as the company’s chief executive, unveiled a corporate restructuring intended to cut costs by $5.5 billion.
Expectations were high for the hotel after it opened in March 2022. Two months later, Bob Chapek, who was then Disney’s chief executive, described demand for stays as strong and said the company expected “100 percent utilization” through the end of the third quarter.
“Response to next-generation storytelling like Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser has been phenomenal,” he said at the time.
Some fans were not shocked by the plans to close Galactic Starcruiser, including Dylan Dickson, who runs the Theme Park Obsession YouTube channel.
In a video in response to the closing, he called the hotel’s short run “disappointing” and “a shame” and suggested that the company tried to subtly bury the news.
But the story took hold on Twitter, where one user lamented that he never got the chance to try the blue-colored shrimps offered at the hotel. Another, poking fun at the futuristic concrete building with few windows, joked that the hotel would be converted into a prison.
Mr. Dickson said he thought the exorbitant price brought the hotel “to its demise,” and he argued that Disney fans should instead visit a park abroad for the same cost. He himself never stayed at the hotel, saying in an email that “the price didn’t justify the experience.”
He thought another “big issue” with Galactic Starcruiser was that it only offered one scenario: Guests are recruited to help either the evil First Order or the gutsy Resistance. That, he said, limited any incentive to return.
“It’s just odd that Disney isn’t willing to figure out a way to discount the experience to make it more obtainable for the average family,” Mr. Dickson said.
In his YouTube video, he said: “All that wasted money, company money, time, blood, sweat and tears that went into this. To me, that’s offensive to the Imagineers. That’s a slap in the face.”
The “Imagineers” are the team at Disney that develops theme park attractions. The company had planned to relocate much of that department to the now-canceled Orlando campus.
In a statement this week, Disney said, “We are so proud of all of the cast members and Imagineers who brought Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser to life and look forward to delivering an excellent experience for guests during the remaining voyages over the coming months.”
Josh D’Amaro, Disney’s theme park and consumer products chairman, noted to employees in an email on Thursday that $17 billion was earmarked for construction at Disney World over the next decade, which he estimated would create 13,000 jobs.
“I remain optimistic about the direction of our Walt Disney World business,” he wrote.
An artist’s conception of the proposed expansion on the west side of Disneyland ResortDisney
In the same week that Disney Parks & Resorts boss Josh D’Amaro announced the company was abandoning a new $1 billion employee campus in Orlando, the president of Disneyland Resort Ken Potrock hosted an OCForum meeting with local business and political leaders in Anaheim to discuss DisneylandForward, the company’s 30-year plan for expansion and innovation in the area.
While DisneylandForward was first introduced in 2021, this week Potrock and other Disney executives revealed new details about the project, including a Disney-sponsored economic study from Cal State Fullerton estimating that, for every $1 billion Disney invests to update and renovate the resort, more than 4,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in economic output would be generated during the four-year construction period. Thereafter, according to the Los Angeles Times, that investment will generate $253 million annually in economic output, $15 million in tax revenue and 2,292 jobs.
(City of Anaheim)
The OCForum presentation was an opportunity for Disney brass to hold a community forum of sorts and rally support for the project in anticipation of the delivery this year of an environmental impact report on the proposed expansion. Through August, Disney is also hosting a series of community coffees in local neighborhoods to share information with Anaheim residents and businesses about DisneylandForward.
Disney, specifically, is looking for Anaheim officials to loosen zoning restrictions in the city’s 1994 “Resort Specific Plan” for the area in and around Disneyland.
The DisneylandForward website maintains that “…while those plans resulted in major improvements to the entire Anaheim Resort, their ‘traditional’ district/zone approach does not allow for the diverse, integrated experiences theme park visitors now seek, severely limiting Disney’s ability to continue investing in Anaheim.”
What the resort needs, the site maintains, is flexibility.
“Today hotel, theme park, retail and dining are all part of one immersive experience. Guests expect that the future of entertainment will seamlessly weave all uses together in ways that were hard to imagine more than 25 years ago when the city created these specific plans.”
Suffice it to say, these meetings are taking place in a very different political atmosphere from that the company faces in Orlando. In fact DeSantis’ California counterpart, Gov. Gavin Newsom, took to Twitter to applaud the results of the Fullerton study presented at the event.
“Great news for the city of Anaheim,” tweeted Newsom along with a media report about the economic forecast.
Potrock posted enthusiastically on Instagram afterward, “What a treat to host the @oc_forum, an amazing group of Anaheim and Orange County business and civic leaders, at Disneyland Resort and share more about DisneylandForward. I am so excited for the future of this incredible resort as we work together on setting the stage for the next several decades – there is so much more magic to come! Thanks for making special appearances, Mickey, Buzz and friends. To infinity and beyond…”
So what are Disney’s plans in the area?
“With DisneylandForward and more flexibility within our existing properties, new lands and adventures like those underway at Tokyo DisneySea and Shanghai Disneyland could inspire new experiences here,” reads the copy on DisneylandForward.com. Examples given are Frozen land and the Tangled and Peter Pan attractions for the original park and Zootopia, Tron and Toy Story elements for Disney’s California Adventure. These are just examples, however. Disney brass have not committed to any of them, though Disney CEO Bob Iger said earlier this year that a new attraction based on the Avatar franchise will hit Disneyland soon.
But where would these new attractions, whatever they may be, go? Artists’ renderings of the plans provided by Disney, while conceptual, show one major development to the west of the current parks near the Disneyland Hotel and another to the southeast of California Adventure. Both plots are currently dedicated mostly to parking. See images below.
An artist’s rendering of the proposed development along the western side of the resort’s existing parks nestled in among the Disneyland Hotel and Disney’s Paradise Hotel. (DisneylandForward.com)
People gather ahead of the “Festival of Fantasy” parade at the Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom theme park in Orlando, Florida, U.S. July 30, 2022. REUTERS/Octavio Jones
May 22 (Reuters) – Walt Disney Co (DIS.N) on Monday dismissed the idea of building miniparks in the United States, saying the media company would instead spend on its major theme parks and cruise ships.
“Focusing on our core assets is where we should be spending most of our opportunity,” Disney parks chief Josh D’Amaro said at a J.P. Morgan conference, in response to a question on whether the company planned to join Comcast Corp’s (CMCSA.O) Universal in building small parks.
An ongoing legal dispute between Disney and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has recently led some other U.S. states to express interest in possible investments from the House of Mickey Mouse.
Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley last month tweeted that “my home state would happily accept” Disney’s theme park jobs and investment “if you want to leave Florida.”
Earlier this month, Disney shelved plans to build a $1 billion corporate campus in Florida that would have housed 2,000 employees.
It has sued DeSantis, a possible Republican presidential nominee, for allegedly “weaponizing” state government in retaliation for its criticism of a Florida law banning classroom discussion of gender identity with younger children.
The political developments have not, however, impacted Disney’s business results, said D’Amaro, who heads the Parks, Experiences and Products business at the company.
He also hinted Disney could open a theme park in the city state of Singapore – the home port for its new cruise ship.
Running a cruise ship in that region “gives you some indication of how guests are receiving the brand and what the opportunities might be going forward,” he said.
