This week saw only a few updates, but the ongoing entertainment changes to the resort are starting to get more attention. We’ll start with a few update items, but then we want to talk a bit about what’s going on with entertainment…
PREVIOUS UPDATE + WDW MASTERPOST
In case you’re behind (it’s easy to fall behind these days…even for us), our last update was on July 30. If you’re brand new and would just like a thorough look at the Disney World reopening, we have a Disney World Reopening Masterpost that covers the basics and links to our deeper content.
Updated Wait Time Scorecards
I’ve done a pretty good job of updating our new “wait time scorecards” once every week. These look at the last seven days of wait times, compare them to the previous seven days, and include analysis about how wait times impact park strategy. We’ve also started doing more “random walk” analysis of different strategies.
The latest wait time scorecard are here:
Disney Beats Quarterly Expectations
Despite an 85% drop in revenue for Parks, Experiences, and Products, Disney’s stock price jumped about 9% following the quarterly earnings report. Analysts see Disney+, which has beaten expectations, as giving Disney enough support to weather the ongoing storm.
I might have more analysis of this later, but the short is just that Disney+ couldn’t have released at a better time. It grew over the first few months and then was able to surge forward while people spent more time at home. I still think it needs more original content, but for now somewhere around $1 billion per quarter is something Disney has to be happy about for a pretty new product (for comparison, parks dropped from $6.5 billion last year this quarter to just under $1 billion this quarter).
Parks Pass Availability Update
As of Wednesday evening (have to work ahead of schedule this week, sorry!), here’s a quick overview of parks pass availability (see the full calendar here):
Theme Park Ticket Guests have full availability through September 26, 2021
Disney Resort Guests have full availability except they are blocked from Hollywood Studios on September 5 and 6, 2020
Meanwhile, annual passholders…
Have no availability for any parks August 6 through August 17
Have only Epcot availability the rest of August, except two days with Animal Kingdom and one day with Magic Kingdom
Have no Hollywood Studios availability until September 8
Have no weekend Hollywood Studios availability until October 11
We’re a week past Disney slowing its plans to reopen hotels. We’re a few days past Disney admitting on the earnings call that tourist demand hasn’t been as high as they expected. So…I dunno…still sort of feels like maybe they could throw a little more availability to the passholders. You can read more about the parks pass system here.
Hollywood Studios Entertainment Updates
There’s two big entertainment updates out of Hollywood Studios. First, the new Disney Society Orchestra debuted this week in the theater formerly occupied by Beauty and the Beast: Live on Stage.
The new show comes as Disney continues a standoff with the Actors’ Equity Association over bringing Equity actors back to Walt Disney World. Those actors made the bulk (entirety?) of the performers in the old Beauty and the Beast show. (The changes to the bird show at Animal Kingdom are another example of an Equity-impacted show.)
Relatedly, there’s now a rumor that Voyage of the Little Mermaid, another live performance at Hollywood Studios, has been permanently closed.
At this point, I consider any loss to be a huge loss. The fact is that we can’t expect much new from the parks, besides what’s already announced, in the coming years, given how many major projects are already underway and how much the finances have been hit.
When I was last in the parks in March, Voyage of the Little Mermaid was pretty busy and several showtimes filled up. And it runs on a very packed schedule. Cutting it completely, rather than reducing the hours, is yet another bad sign for the state of the parks.
Opinion: Disney Isn’t Playing Well With Others
Like last week, I’m going to close with a semi-rant with my opinions on some recent matters. Let’s start basic—the ongoing dispute with Equity is hurting Disney’s ability to provide quality entertainment in the parks.
Granted, it’s unclear just how much that entertainment is worth at the moment, as there isn’t huge demand for the parks and guests are locked into one park per day whether that park can fill a day or not.
Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom are the parks most impacted by the loss of Equity actors, but they’re also the parks with the newest must-do rides (Rise of the Resistance, Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, and Avatar Flight of Passage).
So while I’m unhappy with the ongoing dispute from the perspective of a fan who likes to see parks at their best, I at least admit I can understand why the immediate business case might have Disney dragging their feet.
Also, I’m not knowledgeable enough about Equity and the specifics of the ongoing dispute to place blame on one side or the other. Often in negotiations, the two sides just can’t find common ground, and blaming either side makes little sense.
Sometimes one side is engaging in some sort of illegitimate tactic (e.g. a leader holding out for personal or political gain), but oftentimes it’s just legitimately difficult for two sides to come to an agreement.
In any case, I don’t want to write about the specifics of this dispute and who’s wrong. Instead…
What strikes me most is how much this standoff mirrors the ongoing “standoff” with annual passholders. I’m not comparing the significance of the issues—safe employment disputes are more important than passholders wanting more access to the parks—but Disney’s “we don’t need to give into you” attitude in both cases is off-putting.
Equity and passholders are both significant stakeholders in the Disney World experience. Good relations with both groups fortifies Disney’s long-term ability to provide a quality product for their core target group—vacationers. (Passholders provide a certain level of revenue stability, generally, which helps the business.)
As they say, “the show must go on.” Disney World is hurting. Tourism is down. But passholders are willing to come. And they want to see the best product possible, which includes Equity performers.
As we discussed last week (and as was confirmed on the earnings call this week) there aren’t many vacationers right now, and now Disney is responding with a lesser product and ongoing over-restriction of passholder access to the parks.
Part of me—the cynical part—wants to say SO WHAT? Disney is a massive business with experienced leaders. Maybe they have their reasons, and that’s just business. The world’s leading theme park company maybe knows best when it comes to theme parks.
But the other part of me looks at this week’s earnings call and sees that they now admit demand was less than they expected. This is pretty obvious, as—except for passholders—access to the parks is pretty wide open. Parks pass probably isn’t even necessary.
If I’m being an optimist, I’d say Disney knows demand is not very elastic right now, nor will it be in the near future. People don’t want to go to a theme park in the middle of a pandemic. Park pass allows them to space out passholders, which is…maybe somehow useful. Lower quality shows are the norm because people aren’t coming back to the parks for a few months—or a year or more—anyways.
(Jeez. How bad are things if that’s optimistic?)
But the pessimistic view is that passholders will sign up for Universal instead, which is cheaper, plenty fun, and offers the best theme park land in the country (The Wizarding World of Harry Potter).
If the ongoing standoff with Equity continues, guests will continue to defer trips until “things are more normal” as bloggers lament that in the middle of a pandemic there’s little reason to rush to the parks.
It’s easy to ignore the impact of cuts like Beauty and the Beast: Live on Stage. But many guests are planning once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-decade trips. Like many of you, these guests overplan to try and get the perfect trip, and part of that overplanning is to come to sites like ours and ask “should I visit now or wait.”
Right now, for those guests, the answer is unquestionably that they should wait. With so many big things on the horizon—Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, TRON, Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind, and the 50th Anniversary Celebrations—it’s easy to see greener pastures ahead.
Usually, though, that’s not enough for us to tell people to wait. Because there’s always green pastures ahead. If you wait two years because something new is coming, you’ll just get there and want to wait two more years for the next best thing.
What makes now so different is that the parks have taken a step backwards. They’re less full theme parks and more collections of rides you hustle between avoiding coming within six feet of anyone.
That’s partly the pandemic. Things like streetmosphere and character greetings can’t occur because they encourage guests to crowd. But it’s also partly things like Disney’s decision to engage in this Equity dispute.
Even with the stress created by Rise of the Resistance, Hollywood Studios is an easy park to finish in a day. Without great shows like Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular, Frozen Sing Along, and Beauty and the Beast, the park inevitably leaves many guests wanting more.
So what? People delay, but they still come, right? Maybe. Every delay has cascading effects—instead of coming every three years, you combine two trips. Or the “delay” winds up meaning you don’t come at all because you book Universal or Hawaii instead.
And the parks need revenue today to justify improvements for the future. Disney can keep believing this is just temporary, but if people aren’t in the parks, then the parks aren’t going to do well financially. When the parks do poorly financially, they have to make even more cuts, which makes them an even less appealing product.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope Disney is simply making wise business decisions that I don’t understand. I hope the Equity dispute is resolved soon and this is just an unexpected bump. I hope the passholder restrictions are resolved or kept as some sort of “managing the flow of attendance” strategy (this is my best guess for why they haven’t given APs more space).
But even if they’re making wise business decisions, some PR damage has been done. The truth is that through reopening, Disney hasn’t been the leader we expected them to be.
Down the road, Universal reopened earlier and with no access restrictions. I’ve even seen some commentary characterizing Universal sanitation as more aggressive, but I can’t personally confirm that. Of course, Disney is much more in the spotlight than Universal.
But that spotlight hasn’t been too favorable. They have a major union making antagonistic videos about the parks reopening. The passholder dispute has officially made the newspapers. And top blogs are calling out the new, lower-quality product.
The reopening was always going to be difficult. There was going to be plenty of annoyance and hurt to go around. But like all companies, Disney needs goodwill right now. And the best way to get and keep goodwill is to start playing well with others.