GoofGoof
Premium Member
It seems like the plan now is the AK project will come before beyond Big Thunder Mountain. They hardly mentioned the MK expansion and gave no details this time around. TWDC doesn‘t want to drop a billion in capital improvements for this or any park project immediately but the construction will be spread out over 3-4 years and won’t start in 2023 so it’s not a huge annual investment overall. In the last fiscal year (ending 9/30/22) the company spent $2.7B on capital spending for the domestic parks and resorts segment. A chunk of that is just maintenance on existing assets but 1/3 of the cost of a project this size each year would only be around 10% of total domestic capital spend. That’s pretty doable.Getting back to topic, I realistically don't expect a penny pinching company like Disney to seriously consider retheming DInoland soon. I have to imagine that gutting the Dinosaur building and retheming to Indy, which itself is an expensive attraction and one that is apparently a headache to maintain in Disneyland, is something that's appealing to leadership right now. Also, why move Encanto to Animal Kingdom if they were serious about expanding beyond Big Thunder Mountain?
It's really a wishy-washy mess of "what ifs?" and not real plans, or at least it appears that way. At this point they're attempting damage control and trying to keep the media divisions afloat, so I doubt that they're actually considering any significant park investment. I think it's going to be a long time before any new big plans come to fruition bigger than Country Bears or the Tree of Life show.
The downside is it pushes a beyond Big Thunder Mountain project out to closer to 2030.