There are, of course, many here that will not hesitate to inform you that WDW is too big to fail, too profitable, the infrastructure alone is too valuable, that a Disney vacation is too imbedded in the middle class social fabric to ever become irrelevant, that there will never be a lack of audience and that there are always untapped markets for a value engineered product.
Anybody closely watching the Eastman Kodak company in the late ‘90s might have said many of the same things. In the entertainment industry, Blockbuster Video was unstoppable until it failed to adapt in the early 2000’s. Pan Am was a flagship airline for much of the history of aviation until its failure largely as a victim of mismanagement and stagnation.
If you look at historical lists of the Fortune 500, there’s a lot of unrecognizable names. Major companies fail all the time, they merge or fracture or sell off assets or get bought out. Their customer base shifts away from them, for whatever reason, and they fail to shift with it. It’s the height of hubris to assume Disney is immune from those lessons of history. It’s also willful ignorance to believe that the company thats now seemingly pinning all of its future on copying others in the streaming space can succeed there in the long term, and even if it did that it would choose to spend those rewards to re-innovate in its lost core of themed entertainment.
