GoofGoof
Premium Member
I think most of the time the delays are not an accident. They delay things to spread out costs. However, in this case the money has been “spent”, meaning Wall Street already has that cash outflow factored in to results for at least the next 5 years which of course includes the other parks and cruise ships but WDW will have some new competition down the road so they have good incentives to follow through. The stuff after Villians that hasn’t been formally announced is much less likely to happen. Not saying it won‘t but there’s a lot of time. Obviously any plans can change or be cancelled if there’s a major economic downturn or something as disruptive as covid again. Potential labor shortages could delay some of this work too, but Disney has to be preparing for that.
As far as Pandora, there was a long delay between announcement and open of the land but the construction phase was the standard 3+ years from ground break to open. Disney entered into the licensing agreement with Fox and Cameron in September 2011 for the theme park rights to Avatar. Since this was a substantial agreement between 2 public companies it had to be disclosed publicly in SEC filings at the end of that quarter anyway (9/30/11) so they went public with the news long before any design was complete. It wasn’t until January 2014 that they broke ground on the land and it opened in May 2017 so 3 years and 4 months of actual construction. Time from announcement until opening was just short of 6 years but there were reasons for that.
If they don’t break ground on these projects in the next year then I’d say the timeline is almost certain to slip. I don’t see any of them taking less than 3 years to build.
