I wouldn’t be surprised if daily nighttime shows were a casualty long term. In a regular year now with regular insane attendance, MK hardly needs to provide motivation anymore to keep people around until 9pm. The nighttime parade has already successfully been eliminated. Daily operation probably doesn’t ‘need’ the crowds to stay, exception being if the park can be resold for parties as often as possible.
The conventional wisdom was that a daily lagoon show was essential to keep dining booked at Epcot... once attendance picks up to normal this may be tested. Did Epcot really need Illuminations nightly to make their festival f&b targets? Was Disney already spooked by the lackluster reception of Epcot Forever?
F! has been subject of rumors of performance cuts for years. It’s insanely labor expensive with a huge cast. It needed a full rework pre-pandemic which is now highly doubtful. It’s not a headliner for the studios anymore. Keep a projection / minor pyro show running at the Chinese, but no other park except Disneyland has two major nighttime shows. Until they need to suck up a lot of evening crowds, no F!.
RoL can’t cost much to run, but it also isn’t a destination show either. Pandora drives nighttime hours at AK, the show fills out the bill.
I guess the question becomes, did any of these shows sell enough cupcake viewing parties and dining packages to hold their own? I think they will all be back, eventually, but the company is going to be in cutback mode for years and I doubt they will return immediately upon the fight being ‘won’ against Covid, and perhaps even never again to the level we were all used to. Maybe unfortunately weekends and seasonally only, for the ‘new normal’? Shows with less labor, less pyro and more projection? I think the future is perhaps more murky for the nighttime shows then anything else parks related. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s an obvious place to make some deep long term operational cuts.