People were saying this is the reason SWL in DHS wasn't going to finish until 2021. Just string out construction as long as you can to spread expenditures over quarters and years. Never mind equipment and materials are laying out in the elements for years. Never mind you're not making money from a completed project. Just watch the books!
Some problems with that:
1. That's not how accounting works. Money and budgets can be moved into all sorts of buckets so that a huge up-front expenditure can be spread out over the course of future quarterly reports. Capital expenditures can be separated out of financial statements to show ordinary revenue and income.
2. Once you start building, it's insane to drag along the project. Insane. (Unless you didn't have the money upfront to begin with... but that's not Disney's problem.) Once you start building, you hurt your project by dragging it out. Prolonged exposure to the elements is... insane.
3. People were wrong about how Disney was going to drag out building SWL. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Shortly after the prognosticators were declaring how long the project was going to take, Disney announced 2019 for both parks.
4. When you compare construction projects of Disney to, let's say, Universal Orlando; while Disney does on average take longer, it's not significantly longer. (This is comparing groundbreaking to completion.) There is no data that shows a comparable Disney Project is strung out 300% longer than Universal... more like 30% longer. That's not a sign of spreading construction costs over quarters and years.