I'll crawl out of the shadows to add and confirm a few things.
Disney is concerned because Guests aren't spending money, but unique merchandise has vanished from Walt Disney World. I visited Universal Studios over the weekend and spent over $200 on one-of-a-kind HP and Transformers gear, and other people had bags of souvenir crap. Yet I haven't purchased anything other than food on Disney property since Christmas. That includes Epcot, which is obsessed with women's T-shirts, and Hollywood Studios, which has been overrun with identical plush toys. Heck, you can't even get a Test Track keychain or antenna topper at Test Track. Everything costs too much, everything is generic, everything is sold everywhere. Disney needs to fix this ASAP if they want Guests to start spending money again. Right now you can walk through the parks and see very few merch bags.
There's not much to add to the Hollywood Studios discussion, except that several departments have been notified they should prepare to move their offices away from certain areas that are marked for expansion. Oddly enough, the Beauty and the Beast contract renewals are up in the air, but Disney is hiring more stunt men for Indiana Jones.
Cameras, microphones, and speakers have been installed in Mickey's meet and greet rooms in the MK and DAK. The talking heads should go live within a few months.
Now to add my two cent's worth to the Magic Band NextGen discussion. More than anything else, the promise of crowd management sold execs on My Disney Experience ©®™. The explanation goes like this: crowds have reached almost unmanageable levels, and any new attraction will only drive attendance and add to the chaos. Look at how much busier the MK got based on one restaurant and a simple dark ride! Instead of building new rides, the plan is to force Guests to plan each day in advance; eventually Disney can phase out Standby queues at certain attractions and keep people moving all day. The data mining will help schedule CMs, target merchandise to specific demographics, and improve sales pitches.
Is the Magic Band completely horrible? No. But it is being touted as the solution to Ops problems. That, my friends, is the crux of the issue. Execs aren't planning exciting new attractions for the MK and Epcot to increase revenue and drive Guest satisfaction. They are depending on a glorified ride reservation system. Yes, you can use the bands for admission and purchases, but the real goal is to spread Guests throughout the existing attractions. This will take years to implement. Don't expect it next month or even next year. Meanwhile, hope that WDI gets to play with Frontierland (one Imagineer called it "the area you walk through to get to Splash and Thunder") and Tomorrowland, because the goal isn't to improve the MK's attraction roster. The goal is to redistribute crowds to existing locations and hope they spend enough money on Photopass and merchandise to justify the NextGen initiative. That's why Photopass paid for half the bracelet budget, and why a chunk of the billion-dollar price tag went to merch register systems.
Money has been dumped into helping Guests schedule every single ride and spend money on stuffed Mickeys. It's not a bad business plan, it's just not what the average Guest wants to do after all the stress already associated with a Disney vacation.
Meanwhile, a few miles away, Uni is building incredible rides. You know, the things that make people actually want to go to a theme park.
