The Red Button Option

[Jrb1979]

Yeah, I wouldn't really fault them at all for considering it, since it would seem a good management practice to always keep your options open. But the practicalities of such a deal are so hard to fathom actually getting accomplished. I can't imagine a scenario where the world leader in theme parks very publicly states "we can't make the parks work and we don't want them anymore," and someone is gleefully there to pick them up and make a case to Wall Street for more investment.



Iger has spent fantastically on the parks, but I don't think anyone will ever match Eisner's personal connection to Disneyland Paris. It really is a shame what happened there.

If you love the IP takeover then all the power to you. Sorry but Epcot was much better during the era of Horizons and World of Motion. Those dark rides I liked, what they have done to Epcot is a disgrace. Frozen has nothing to do with Norway. Their desicion to go away from original attractions to IP based ones has been a disaster and it's all because they are after that wine mom crowd.

 

[lazyboy97o]

It was announced at shareholder meetings. I don’t know where to find the recordings, but @lazyboy97o is right. NextGen and FP+ were part of a “Blue Ocean” strategy* to avoid further investments in new attractions. The company also hoped the ease of tapping a band would lead to increased merch sales, helping offset the cost of the initiative. All of that is known fact.

Now here’s where the speculation comes into play. The increased sales didn’t happen. Fans have guessed it’s either because the necessary PIN process emphasized “you are spending money” more than Iger realized, or because merch quality and variety dropped while prices rose, or because the company greedily raised prices far above inflation, or a combination of those factors. Bottom line, merch didn’t offset the sunken costs of NextGen. The FP+ shell game also didn’t negate the need for investment. So now we’re here.

*a gross misunderstanding of true Blue Ocean business strategy

Anyone with half a brain should have realized that double digit growth just from the novelty of using a bracelet was an on-site idea.

Matt Ouimet, the excellent guy Iger dumped when his popularity surpassed Iger’s own among the fan base?

This alone should say enough about Iger’s view of the parks, he chose Jay “Get me out of this stupid place” Rasulo over Matt Ouimet. Sure, it’s not usually a good idea to make it known that your boss should be sacked for you, but how often does said boss also make it clear he dislikes his job and primary product?

 

[TrainsOfDisney]

True, but I think there were plenty of comparable painful decisions under Eisner, too. For example, Mr Toad into Winnie the Pooh, 2000 Leagues into a playground, Horizons into Mission:Space, Journey Into Imagination into whatever it is now, etc.

The MK is a different story but for sure I’ll give you Horizons to Mission Space being equal to movie ride and figment being equal to Pixar Pier. Plus the entire imagination pavilion became an IP (honey I shrunk)

 

[Jrb1979]

Anyone with half a brain should have realized that double digit growth just from the novelty of using a bracelet was an on-site idea.

This alone should say enough about Iger’s view of the parks, he chose Jay “Get me out of this stupid place” Rasulo over Matt Ouimet. Sure, it’s not usually a good idea to make it known that your boss should be sacked for you, but how often does said boss also make it clear he dislikes his job and primary product?

Cedar Fair thanks Iger for letting Ouimet go. He did lots to improve their parks.

 

["El Gran Magnifico"]

Anyone with half a brain should have realized that double digit growth just from the novelty of using a bracelet was an on-site idea.

A very expensive idea. From what some of my friends tell me. Not just from the investment in that, but also the projects it side-tracked or eliminated. Data is King.

 

[lazyboy97o]

I find this kind of analysis super hard to take seriously, to be honest. The idea that Iger is somehow obsessed with eclipsing Walt Disney or that he got rid of executives because they were too popular with the fans, that is. He certainly seems to want to be seen as up there with Steve Jobs, but, ridiculous or not, that makes sense for a high-profile CEO at this point in time. The other stuff seems like what Disney fans would imagine Iger would be thinking about but from which he always seemed aloof. Iger certainly never struck me as using Walt Disney as his yardstick.

Just look at the way The Imagineering Story rewrites history.

 

[FigmentJedi]

I find this kind of analysis super hard to take seriously, to be honest. The idea that Iger is somehow obsessed with eclipsing Walt Disney or that he got rid of executives because they were too popular with the fans, that is. He certainly seems to want to be seen as up there with Steve Jobs, but, ridiculous or not, that makes sense for a high-profile CEO at this point in time. The other stuff seems like what Disney fans would imagine Iger would be thinking about but from which he always seemed aloof. Iger certainly never struck me as using Walt Disney as his yardstick.

I mean there was that stuff within the discourse surrounding the Lasseter firing that John supposedly saw some of the older big names at Disney Animation like Sanders and Keane as a threat to his authority, so it's not that hard to imagine the same thing going on within the higher management tiers.

 

[MaximumEd]

Just look at the way The Imagineering Story rewrites history.

Such as? I haven’t seen all of them yet.

 

[el_super]

Magic Kingdom can always be expanded with ease. East Avenue giving Main Street increased throughput, use the Adventureland Pad, etc. Crowding at MK has always been an issue that can be resolved.

But if it's always been a problem, then how do you know it can ever be resolved?

Seriously the crowding issues are far more nuanced than just building out more space. Building new attractions is great, but then you are limited to the capacity of those new attractions at a micro level. If your park only holds 60,000 people, but 70,000 want to come in, you have a capacity issue. If only 20,000 of those 60,000 can ride your new attraction, you still have a capacity issue. If the lines for your most popular attractions are all 60+ minutes, but no one is waiting for the Tiki Room, you have a capacity problem. Is the bizarre math of capacity that makes sense of removing attractions for meet-and-greets, closing high capacity people eaters like Carousel of Progress and trying to jam more and more theater shows into the park.

That bizarre math is what NGE was supposed to help resolve. I think it's overall success is probably debatable, but it's a far different premise than finding a way to completely stop investment in the parks.

 

[lazyboy97o]

But if it's always been a problem, then how do you know it can ever be resolved?

Seriously the crowding issues are far more nuanced than just building out more space. Building new attractions is great, but then you are limited to the capacity of those new attractions at a micro level. If your park only holds 60,000 people, but 70,000 want to come in, you have a capacity issue. If only 20,000 of those 60,000 can ride your new attraction, you still have a capacity issue. If the lines for your most popular attractions are all 60+ minutes, but no one is waiting for the Tiki Room, you have a capacity problem. Is the bizarre math of capacity that makes sense of removing attractions for meet-and-greets, closing high capacity people eaters like Carousel of Progress and trying to jam more and more theater shows into the park.

That bizarre math is what NGE was supposed to help resolve. I think it's overall success is probably debatable, but it's a far different premise than finding a way to completely stop investment in the parks.

The Magic Kingdom has less dining capacity today than 30 years ago. There is abandoned retail space and abandoned attraction space. The crowding is a deliberate choice to decrease attractions per guest per hour, that same goal of minimizing the need to invest in additional capacity.

 

[TrainsOfDisney]

Adding Galaxies Edge to Disneyland added capacity to the park. Adding Galaxies edge to dhs didn’t.

(I’m sure Martin or penguin has a chart or inner knowledge to prove me wrong, but that’s my thinking based on visiting both parks before and after expansions.)

Fantasyland Forest and storybook circus should have been the equivalent of a 5th gate at wdw.

 

[The_Jobu]

Disney can't compete with that.

Nor should they

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Such as? I haven’t seen all of them yet.

Well...

• It conveniently mixes up the timeline of events (BTMRR is in the Eisner episode even though that ride predates his tenure).
• The WESTCOT/Port Disney competition is completely excised from that episode. Port Disney/DisneySea is the true origin of TDS.
• The Eisner episode overplays the cultural backlash to EuroDisney Resort and only Eisner himself mentions once that the real issue was overbuilding the number of hotels and that leading to the crippling debt.
• Kim Irvine gets to portray herself as the victim in the inappropriate addition of Disney characters to IASW, though she herself did not first pitch that idea and the editing appears to give her credit for Haunted Mansion Holiday, a project she did not work on.
• The doc doesn’t outright note what Iger said at the beginning of his tenure as CEO that the parks would only do franchise/IP based additions going forward.

 

[el_super]

The Magic Kingdom has less dining capacity today than 30 years ago. There is abandoned retail space and abandoned attraction space. The crowding is a deliberate choice to decrease attractions per guest per hour, that same goal of minimizing the need to invest in additional capacity.

Yes, because part of the capacity equation is convincing people to use that capacity. If people don't want to use the capacity, facilities sit empty. People are, especially at WDW, attracted to the latest and greatest and the downside to that is the expected facility lifespan takes a nosedive due to lack of demand. You can of course resolve this by bulldozing large areas of the park and starting over, but they would be held to the fire for not respecting their history if they did that.

It wouldn't make sense to create this giant conspiracy to reduce attraction visits in order to justify less investment.... since they have continued to invest anyway. Didn't they have a new ride opening this year?

 

[tirian]

And to be fair... I do enjoy the gossip. So far the most interesting take away here has been that very few people have read Iger's book.

It’s because this site gained its insiders a couple years before Iger became CEO, and those of us who’ve been following his tenure know the book is pure propaganda.

 

[lazyboy97o]

Such as? I haven’t seen all of them yet.

The big way is in the order of topics discussed. The series is presented chronologically but in the latter episodes subjects are shuffled around to suggest they occurred during Iger’s tenure.

Haunted Mansion Holiday is presented as a post-Eisner project as part of Iger’s turnaround. The attraction opened in 2001 and it wasn’t even an Imagineering project.

Aquatopia and Pooh’s Hunny Hunt are completely skipped. This means the genesis of trackless rides is completely skipped and that technology is only first discussed in relation to Ratatouille. The end of the Ratatouille segment then ends stating that after the attraction opened Disneyland [Resort] Paris was the most popular tourist destination in Europe. This implies that Ratatouille was the cause of that popularity but had already been true.

It credits Iger with the Hong Kong Disneyland three land expansion that was demanded by the government because the park that opened was smaller than the one that was first announced.

There are more examples in the threads about the series.

 

["El Gran Magnifico"]

The Magic Kingdom has less dining capacity today than 30 years ago.

Capacity and Quality.

 

[lazyboy97o]

Yes, because part of the capacity equation is convincing people to use that capacity. If people don't want to use the capacity, facilities sit empty. People are, especially at WDW, attracted to the latest and greatest and the downside to that is the expected facility lifespan takes a nosedive due to lack of demand. You can of course resolve this by bulldozing large areas of the park and starting over, but they would be held to the fire for not respecting their history if they did that.

It wouldn't make sense to create this giant conspiracy to reduce attraction visits in order to justify less investment.... since they have continued to invest anyway. Didn't they have a new ride opening this year?

It’s not a conspiracy. It was the company’s objective since the mid-90s. It’s the same reason Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Disney’s California Adventure, Walt Disney Studios Park and Hong Kong Disneyland were so small.

 

[tirian]

I see what you're getting at here, but I think there's a slightly different focus between what they were trying to accomplish with NextGen and overall parks investment. The point of NextGen was to get more capacity and spending out of their existing facilities, and not necessarily to circumvent or avoid continued investment in new attractions and facilities. In the most simplistic terms, building a 5th park or a 6th park was not going to do anything to convince people to stop visiting MK, and the MK was so miserably crowded that they were having a real guest service crisis. NGE was meant to address those areas.

History has shown that they continued to invest in their other parks though. AK got Pandora. DHS got Toy Story and Star Wars. Epcot would have been next but ... well you know. It makes sense to invest in the other parks in order to draw attendance and capacity away from MK, but after literally *decades* of trying, their successes have not been so great. If MK has literally reached the plateau of how many people they can cram into the place, then yeah, investment will be on a scale comparable to maintenance rather than expansion. But that still leaves the potential to invest elsewhere.

That’s great that you’ve got an opinion, but it’s objectively, factually wrong. No offense. The purpose of FP+ and NextGen were to minimize future investments in expensive new attractions by shuffling around crowds and maintaining the Disney Faithful that were buying DVC. This is how they sold it to investors. This was also Iger and Co.’s misunderstanding of Blue Ocean business strategy.

I’m not saying it makes sense.

The investments in other parks didn’t need NextGen to pull crowds away from the MK. The parks simply needed to be built out and updated; for example, Epcot 2017 had significantly less to do than Epcot 1995. Everything you listed could’ve been built without NextGen, which seems to be suffering a slow death now anyway.

 

[tirian]

If you love the IP takeover then all the power to you. Sorry but Epcot was much better during the era of Horizons and World of Motion. Those dark rides I liked, what they have done to Epcot is a disgrace. Frozen has nothing to do with Norway. Their desicion to go away from original attractions to IP based ones has been a disaster and it's all because they are after that wine mom crowd.

Frozen certainly should’ve been built in the MK, but Magic Disney Magic Magic Wishes belong everywhere, right?