But nobody pays $60 and travels thousands of miles to see cardboard. Cardboard doesn't convince someone from Nowheresville, Iowa to finally take that WDW vacation. How does Disney convince people to visit an attraction that was built on an obviously shoestring budget? What if you were Epcot's PR director and had to convince people to ride Journey Into YOUR Imagination? Word-of-mouth certainly won't cut it, it's too unpredictable, especially for an attraction made of "cardboard." And can you imagine how much an advertising campaign would cost for something like this? This would easily affect both revenue and costs, not to mention the $$$ it would take to update it, and then inevitably close it after 5 years after poor performance and replace it with something else. Wouldn't it be so much better to have an attraction that speaks for itself? You don't need to advertise Pirates of the Caribbean, because eveyone knows what it is, and they will inevitably visit the attraction during their vacation. POTC is one of the most profitable attractions ever, and all Disney has to do is clean it, paint it, and put the merchandise on the shelves, because all the money was spent making the attraction the best possible. The point: people know quality. They don't care what the budget is, they don't care what pressure you were under from execs, they don't care how much money you're saving. They paid $60 to get in, and they want to be entertained NOW. Cardboard doesn't exactly cut it.
