Time for a creative outlet.
It is the year 2033. We are at the conclusion of the "Iger Decade", and let's look back on what they delivered on the heels of the announced $60 billion in investment in the parks and resorts, specifically in Florida.
1 new flume ride, inspired by Moana
1 new Epcot festival (resulting in the renaming of the park to The EPCOT Festival, since festivals were year-round now)
4 rethemed rides
4 new nighttime fireworks shows (all received poor guest reviews and light attendance, so they recreated Wishes! and RoE, which resulted in massive crowds)
18 new, themed meet and greet locations
12 new DVC resorts (4 yet to break ground)
Price tag for it all? Just a hair under $20 billion.
Meanwhile, up I-4, Universal has enjoyed much success as a result of their Epic Universe theme park. Disney announced several new mini-lands in 2026 to combat its success, only to cancel them due to "financial concerns" in mid-2029. Epic Universe was so successful that Comcast bought more land and built a fourth theme park that recently opened to overwhelming crowds. Disney, once the undisputed king of theme parks in Orlando, has been surviving but only due to large room and ticket discounts, plus multiple free dining offers per year, for the past 8 years. WDW also built a custom area for Annual Passholders to have picnics as an enticement for locals to buy APs, but the area was closed off after only 6 months due to a scant number of guests actually using it (rumors from CMs who staffed the area said only 3-4 people showed up each day, and those were usually asking for the time of the 3 o'clock parade). WDW vacations, once considered a rite-of-passage for many children, trended to being an add-on to a Universal vacation rather than the reverse.
Disney's Parks division, once the golden goose of the company, has struggled to break even for the past 8 years. Missteps in park management accounted for most of the problems, with Iger's "movie IP mandate" becoming an albatross around the creative neck of WDI and the parks division. New ride concepts were rejected as being "too risky", resulting in most of Disney's "Imagineers" leaving the company, the "new rides" were all existing rides that received a re-theme, with the exception of a new Moana-themed flume at Disney's Animal Kingdom. This newly-built flume ride, opened in 2031, has resulted in a small bump in attendance but the park has suffered from other missteps, particularly incorporating the once-iconic Indiana Jones into the former Dinoland area and the Dinosaur ride, which gave attendance a boost for 3 years (from 2028-2030) before park attendance cratered, largely due to the $300/day ticket prices implemented as a result of the ride. One other glaring misstep was retheming the "Rock N Roller Coaster, starring Aerosmith" to be "Olivia Rodrigo's rock n roller coaster". Fans soundly rejected the ride as a result, and many went as far as chaining themselves across the entrance gates in protest. Unfortunately, the company rushed contract negotiations in 2024 with the fizzled-out pop signer in an attempt to draw younger crowds to its Hollywood Studios theme park, resulting in a ride that cannot draw guests (it frequently only handles 100-200 guests per hour) and cannot be rethemed for another 6 years. The EPCOT Festival Park, once panned for its construction walls, continues to be a sore spot for the company. The newly-renamed "Communicore Concert Hall" was a bust from opening day in late 2024, failing to garner much support from park guests. Vandals forced the park to remove the "Dreaming Walt" statue in 2024 after maintenance crews were removing toilet paper from the statue on a daily basis. The lone bright spot for the park has been the "Festival of Wonders" pavilion, formerly the Wonders of Life pavilion. It has provided interactive entertainment for guests of all ages, and with Disney committing to refreshing the content every other year (an unprecedented commitment from the company), the pavilion has drawn in new guests to the park by the millions. It harkens back to the roots of the original EPCOT Center by attempting to inspire guests and give them hope for the future.
The theme park attendance scales, once tipped heavily in Disney's favor in Orlando, tipped the other way in 2028 when the 3 Universal theme parks out-drew the 4 WDW theme parks for the first time ever. This was on the heels of a massive Harry Potter revival and new theme park presence (with a rumored price tag of $2 billion). Universal was flush with cash following the sale of its stake in Hulu back to Disney for $17 billion, following independent evaluators valuing the streaming platform at a whopping $51 billion in late 2023. Disney sued, lost, and appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was unanimously rejected by the high court. Hulu and Disney+ were then merged to form the new Disney++, and following the transformation of ESPN into a DTC provider, plus the advent of sports wagering through your TV, it became the undisputed king of streaming platforms.
Josh D'Amaro left Disney in 2026 for Universal under less-than-friendly terms, as he challenged Bob Iger for the CEO spot after the Board announce "no suitable candidates had been found", and he was roundly rejected by the Board of Directors by a vote 11-0. It was a dirty battle, with Iger engaging in a nasty smear campaign against his former lieutenant, resulting in large numbers of park fans (also known as "Josh's Fanboi and Fangurl Club" online) swearing off Disney forever. As a result, all succession planning was jettisoned and the then-75-year-old Iger was given a contract to be CEO-for-life.
It's always fun looking back on tomorrow.
