The major focal point of the central spine has not been canceled. It has been delayed. The festival area is simply a placeholder for a couple of years from the sound of it.
The live entertainment cuts should just be cuts during the pandemic. The only long-term cancelations that I know of are the Nemo show and RoL.
The Magical Express and EMH moves confuse me, but that has nothing to do with investment into the parks.
As for Spaceship Earth, who knows what's going to happen. The general consensus was that the redo was probably not going to be the best, so maybe it's a good thing it never got off the ground.
But Universal is going to continue to invest and build but so is Disney. Disney has done substantially more construction during this time than Universal. They delayed their 3rd gate to ~2025. The combined work on Guardians, Tron, and Ratatouille, while slow, is not a zero amount of work. Velocicoaster was is a single project that Universal is working on. While Universal has a tendency to announce projects at the last minute, the only project opening that we know of is the Velocicoaster. To my belief, Universal didn't open anything in 2020, and will only open one project in 2021. There is nothing on the radar for 2022 or 2023 but they could always surprise us. I'm well aware that a full new gate is a very large investment, but Universal is not spending more capital on their parks right now than Disney -- and they shouldn't be, since their resort is substantially smaller, but Disney is not in hibernation mode.
This is a very bizarre time, and quite frankly, what Disney is doing is fine. It isn't the best situation for guests, but it is fine. When it comes to investing strategies there's a couple.
- Constant investment regardless of the current economic situation.
- Investment during prosperous times.
- Investment during recession times.
- Constant negligible investment.
During the 2001-2010 time period, Disney did strategy number 4 but then pivoted to strategy number 2 which does two main things, capitalizes on the current good economy by driving up attendance and provides an incentive to people to visit during future recession times. It allows the company to ride out bad times when funds are low by investing when funds are abundant.
Since it's corona time, there's a general consensus that Disney is not expected to shell out a ton of money. They're not even going full DEFCON. Tron and Guardians have not been cut. They're doing the bare minimum, yes, but it is a lot better than 2001-2010 Disney, granted, that's a low bar, but Disney isn't slamming on the brakes, they're just decelerating, but as I said in my first post, they were planning on slowing down anyway, so corona time is less causing massive cancelations but more stretching out the time table.
The Mary Poppins cancelation is barely negative. From my understanding, it was a faulty project from the start.