At this point, I whole-heartedly believe that even a minimal announcement regarding DHS at D23 would be a HUGE PR nightmare for the company. With the state of the park widely discussed not just on the message boards but also in the mainstream media, how could they afford to ignore the elephant in the room?
Because to the mainstream media, Disney announcing fancy new Star Wars rides is an easy fluff piece.
Disney
not announcing Star Wars rides isn't even a non-story; it's nothing.
Please post some articles in non-geek sources if I'm wrong here, but I can't recall any articles in the mainstream press about the situation at DHS that weren't mostly couched in possible excitement for the announcement of new Star Wars-based attractions. Why else would readers be interested?
Regardless of whether or not they WANT to announce anything of substance this weekend, I feel like that really don't have a choice, at least from a business standpoint. They really need to get out in front of this story; it seems to already be getting away from them. Without announcing anything of substance, I think they're going to be doing real damage, and perhaps diminishing the overall effect when they finally do announce something of substance regardless of the grandeur sounding it.
I disagree. Or rather, I think Disney would disagree.
Every announcement of a major expansion or attraction is a precious PR commodity to Disney, and not something to be squandered. To Disney, bunching announcements together would count as squandering them, because the impact is lost if they're not separated. This year, Disneyland can announce their upcoming Star Wars announcement, and Disney World can announce the new flat rides and spinners coming for the Toy Story Playland. Next year, it will be time to announce the new Avatar attractions and give some details, assuming the Pandoraland project is still on track to open in 2017 (which will take a miracle) and
then maybe the year after that Disney might announce Star Wars stuff for WDW. Or not. That might be the year Radiator Springs Lite gets announced for Pixar Place.
Finally, the last thing Disney would want to do is for families to delay their vacations because they're waiting for one project or other to be announced, so I expect any announcements of new WDW attractions to trickle out as slowly as possible and for the construction to follow at a similar pace. That's assuming of course that a further economic slowdown or rise in gas prices doesn't cancel everything.
