I think you're missing the point, this isn't about nostalgia, this is about dollars and cents gone haywire. When a business over the course of only five years has now priced out a significant amount of their audience and it's based upon padding profit margins and numbers, that's the issue. Disney continues to offer a lesser product by the year, month, day, whatever, yet they have a price trajectory that doesn't match their product or reality.
But have they? I don't have the numbers to back it up, but isn't attendance at record highs? All I hear now is that any 'slow season' has all but eroded away and there is very few gaps in mid to high crowd volume.
To you and I—the die hard's who go regularly and care enough to be here on a Sunday night talking about it on a disney-themed message board, we can see the decline of product. But are the "every 3-year families" seeing the same?
Granted, we are discussing annual passes, so overall, those people are not the focus of this product. But are AP's bad for business? That is a whole other conversation.
In my prior career, I was in the television industry, and Disney's main revenue driver has become television and film. There's a problem there, it's cyclical. Disney's number one driver of profit is the revenue from ESPN carriage costs and there is complete destabilization in the industry that has only begun and it many in the business are extremely concerned about the the long-term implications of cord cutting, sliced and diced packages, etc. The theme parks have always been a stable and highly profitable piece of the income pie and tends to cover 20-25% of the company's profits.
Agreed, cord cutting will be a huge problem when networks are such a large source of your revenue. But when you own the networks, a la carte content delivery can be more profitable then any bundled platform.
The correct way to look at it is that The Walt Disney Company is an entertainment conglomerate anchored by their highly profitable theme park business that always provides a stable foundation of profit. They still can't get their act together with interactive, so they've merged divisions all in an effort to mask fiscal weakness in that end of business. Merchandising is huge, but Disney runs a giant licensing operation as they produce next to nothing in terms of consumer products outside of what they have manufactured for the parks. I can tell you from industry stories, that's a mess of a division to deal with as well.
I can agree with the "anchored" analogy.
As for merchandising, they may be a to deal with, but they are so popular, that companies will put up with their issues. Licensing has nothing but huge profit written all over it. Let someone else take the manufacturing and inventory hit while you just collect the royalty checks. However, they need the network shows to create a constant and fresh stream of listenable properties.
High five...good dialog...
