Can’t see the WSJ article but… $1.8 billion for the Adventure build-out?
Here you go:
Disney executives thought they had made an amazing deal: a partially built cruise ship that its bankrupt owner was willing to unload for just $40 million. They figured it would cost about $1 billion to complete—less than half what the company typically spends to build a new vessel.
Then the Imagineers got their hands on it.
Imagineers design every Disney princess castle, roller coaster and restaurant and are responsible for the highest-stakes bets in entertainment. They discovered it was harder than their bosses expected to turn a ship made for gambling into a family-friendly entertainment vessel. Starting in 2023, they tore out its center and moved steel girders until they resembled Swiss cheese. They doubled the size of the galleys, expanded the stage and made room for a Marvel stunt show and 12 themed restaurants, including a Pixar buffet. They fought, with mixed success, for the time and money to rebuild everything from the sound system to the central staircase.
“It was like trying to turn a Honda into a Hummer,” said Justin Newton, a former Imagineer who oversaw the retrofit and now works at SeaWorld owner United Parks & Resorts.
The final cost of the ship, now known as the Disney Adventure, is about $1.8 billion. Its launch in Singapore was delayed at the last minute from December to March 2026 to complete the finishing touches, forcing the company to refund and reschedule thousands of reservations.
The Adventure will be Disney’s biggest and most immersive ship, and retrofitting it saved years of work compared with building it from scratch, Walt Disney Imagineering President Bruce Vaughn said.
The theme parks and cruise ships Vaughn’s team designs cost billions of dollars, dwarfing the budgets of movies that cost several hundred million-dollar dollars at most. When they succeed, they bring in revenue for decades and imprint Disney characters into children’s memories.
Theme parks and cruises have overtaken television as Disney’s biggest source of profits, and the company is counting on them to fuel its growth for the rest of this decade and beyond. Disney is investing $60 billion in theme parks and cruise ships through 2033—nearly double what it spent in the prior decade.
Imagineers have to spend that money. They’re currently expanding or improving all six of the company’s global resorts, including new Marvel attractions in Anaheim, Calif., a ride through the magical home from “Encanto” in Orlando, and a “Lion King” land in Paris. They’re also designing a new park in Abu Dhabi and growing the cruise line from seven ships to 13.
Imagineering’s roughly 3,000 artists, engineers and project managers have long operated largely in secret, a company tactic so that theme park visitors would feel they were entering a magical alternate world. They work in unmarked warehouses with curtains surrounding the most sensitive work and sign nondisclosure agreements. Inside the company, they’ve been both a source of pride for their creative genius and frustration due to their insular culture and budget-busting spending.
Disney parks are full of attractions that opened late, went over budget, or needed costly overhauls after debuting with a thud. The delays and cost overruns on the Adventure are just the latest. Material and labor costs, government regulations and technology can all change during projects that take as long as five years.
Imagineers now face heightened pressure to deliver projects on time and on budget after years of failing to do so, according to people close to the company. A spokeswoman said 93% of Imagineering’s work in the past four years has come in under-budget.
They’re also fending off increased competition from rival Universal Studios, which is aggressively expanding its theme parks and hiring some former Imagineers.
Imagineering leaders are also trying to restore morale employees say was pummeled by a decade of layoffs, conflicts with corporate leadership and an aborted plan to move the team to Florida. Vaughn, a widely respected veteran Imagineer who was pushed out in 2016, was brought back to lead the charge.
“This is by far the most ambitious period” in Imagineering’s history, the 60-year-old said in an interview in his Glendale, Calif., office. “We’re going to ramp up and reignite Imagineering culturally and we’ve got a tremendous amount of investment coming through.”
Imagineers have been both central to and apart from the Walt Disney Company since they started designing Disneyland ahead of its 1955 opening. They worked on the studio lot but were technically employees of an independent company called WED Enterprises, which was wholly owned by its namesake, Walter Elias Disney.
Walt sold WED to his entertainment company in 1965. His designers started calling themselves Imagineers that same decade, but the division wasn’t renamed Walt Disney Imagineering until 1986. A cultural shift took longer. Well into the 21st century, Imagineers referred to WDI as “the company,” confusing new arrivals who thought they meant parent corporation Disney.
Their pride was hard-earned. Imagineers are a distinctly diverse group of craftspeople, with skills ranging from costume design to mechanical engineering to project management. They hold 831 active patents for technologies, including multidirectional moving floors and rotating roller coasters, and have wowed guests with achievements like the Enchanted Tiki Room’s singing birds in 1963 and a Spider-Man robot doing aerial acrobatics today.
Some Imagineers saw executives as an obstacle that needed to be overcome. They sometimes used a process known internally as “progressive seduction” to get approval for projects at a smaller scale and then suggest one seemingly small improvement at a time until it was as big as they actually wanted it to be, a person with knowledge of the matter said.
Their prized autonomy took a hit after Bob Iger became Disney’s CEO in 2005. His mandate for parks was the same as for movies: Focus on franchises, whether from the company’s vaults or his acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm. Movie characters have been part of the parks since Disneyland opened, but Imagineering also has a rich history of creating original stories in attractions like Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion and Jungle Cruise. That largely stopped by the 2010s.
“At every all-hands meeting, I would be asked if we’d get to create new Imagineering original stories again,” said Barbara Bouza, who was president of WDI from 2020 to 2024 and is now an executive at architecture firm CannonDesign.
From the late 2000s through the 2010s, Imagineers built a new Cars Land at California Adventure, opened a new theme park in Shanghai and designed new lands in the U.S. based on Star Wars and Avatar.
All were successful with fans and none went according to plan, said people with knowledge of the matter. Shanghai Disneyland cost nearly $2 billion more than originally estimated and opened a year later than scheduled. Orlando’s Pandora-The World of Avatar cost $1.2 billion compared with an original budget of $850 million.
A Millennium Falcon ride in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge was designed with five different missions, but opened with only one due to budget and time constraints. The other Star Wars attraction, called Rise of the Resistance, wasn’t ready when Galaxy’s Edge opened in 2019 and broke down frequently at first.
“That was the hardest attraction technically that the company’s ever built,” Imagineer Craig Russell said of the massive, multilevel Rise of the Resistance. “It’s a ride system inside a ride system inside a ride system.”
It’s now one of the most popular rides at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
Russell, who co-ran WDI with Vaughn from 2007 through 2016, said there were healthy debates over whether to measure his group’s work more based on design and construction costs or the value of its creations in the long-term. Imagineers, of course, preferred the latter metric.
When Bob Chapek took over Disney’s parks business in 2015, he focused intensely on getting Imagineers to stick to budgets and schedules. He believed WDI had been allowed to operate without the same discipline required of the rest of the company, said people with knowledge of the matter.
It was a huge and, for many Imagineers, unwelcome culture shock.
Chapek, who was Disney’s CEO from 2020 to 2022, replaced Vaughn and Russell with another veteran Imagineer, Bob Weis, and brought in new people to manage costs. “Senior financial executives were visiting WDI daily, sitting down to approve or disapprove budget items, even tiny ones, line by line,” Weis wrote in his memoir “Dream Chasing.”
Imagineering’s size ballooned and contracted over the years depending on how much work there was to do. After Shanghai opened, the company lost many veteran designers after it offered buyouts to Imagineers who had been there at least 20 years.
It was also a time of diminished ambition, because senior parks executives didn’t trust WDI could deliver projects on time and on budget. Plans for several major Marvel attractions were killed, people familiar with the matter said.
Proposals by Imagineers to refurbish Disneyland’s aging Tomorrowland were also turned down, as executives calculated it wouldn’t do enough to increase attendance.
“It wasn’t fun anymore,” said Theron Skees, an Imagineer for 23 years who left in 2020 and now runs a themed-entertainment consulting firm.
Things got worse in 2020, when most Imagineers were furloughed because there was so little work to do during the pandemic. Later that year, 411 were laid off.
Soon after, those left in Imagineering’s Glendale headquarters were informed they’d have to move to Florida as part of a larger corporate relocation. When Disney canceled the plan in 2023, “some people were screaming with joy and others were crying because they had bought a house,” said former Imagineer David Kalbeitzer, who’s now a producer and consultant.
In the winter of 2023, soon after Iger returned as CEO, Disney experiences chairman Josh D’Amaro asked Vaughn to lunch at a seafood restaurant near the beach in Orange County. The ex-Imagineer thought he would be providing advice to a former colleague, but the conversation shifted to the plan to nearly double Disney’s investment in parks, cruise ships and related technology to $60 billion over the next decade.
“That blew my mind,” said Vaughn, who started his career in movie visual effects before working at Imagineering for 23 years and then as a startup CEO and Airbnb executive.
D’Amaro, who is one of two candidates to succeed Iger as Disney CEO, believed Vaughn had the right mix of creative expertise, business acumen and staff respect to head WDI at a critical juncture. Vaughn ran the unit alongside Bouza for a year before becoming president in 2024.
For his bosses and shareholders, Vaughn’s mission is to build attractions that expand capacity, so more people can spend more time and money. Since a postpandemic rebound, attendance at Disney’s theme parks has been flat, with financial growth driven in part by price increases.
Current and former employees say Vaughn needs to reignite morale and end disconnects with corporate executives. Already, he’s delegated power and resources to Imagineers who work at the company’s resorts in Orlando and overseas so they can handle more work themselves, from designing models to fixing quality issues. He said the move was inspired by Imagineers in Shanghai designing a new Zootopia land largely on their own when bosses in California couldn’t travel during the pandemic.
Vaughn has brought back retired Imagineers including Russell as consultants to mentor younger staffers. He’s also including colleagues from park operations, marketing and pricing earlier in planning so they’re aligned from the outset.
“We’re very disciplined and we manage the budget and schedule, I think, excellently,” he said. The challenge, he added, is, “There’s not a science to this. We don’t ever build the same thing.”
WDI is designing robots based on Star Wars and Frozen that can roam park grounds and projection technology that changes audio-animatronic characters’ expressions with light. It’s using videogame engines to move digital assets from films into rides, including a second mission on the Millennium Falcon ride that will be based on May’s “Mandalorian and Grogu” Star Wars film.
And it’s building an internal artificial intelligence tool that accumulates 73 years of research and design work for Imagineers to draw on when doing new work.
Some Imagineers say what they’re most excited about is Villains Land, an expansion of Orlando’s Magic Kingdom currently under construction. Though it will feature characters from “Snow White,” “Peter Pan” and “Aladdin,” it’s not based on a specific film. That makes it the closest thing to an original land in Disney’s U.S. parks in 25 years.
