Smooch
Well-Known Member
If you don't like the place, that's certainly one thing. I'm definitely not spending a lot of time over there. But trying to claim that the article is inaccurate, and using your personal feelings as proof of that, is folly. The expansion is certainly not a failure. Revenues were up after the opening. The reservations for the light sabers and bar were booked solid for weeks. Rise of the Resistance tickets were the hardest to obtain and the level of interest in it, generated its very own daily tracking thread here. I also don't really think that saying attendance was flat at the second most attended theme park on the planet is really the embarrassing condemnation some here are painting it as.
They saw poor attendance and the parks only had an increase in profit due to spending in other parks / areas. Sure the whole park wasn't a ghost town but you can't make the claim that what happened is what Disney planned. They talked about how they wouldn't need to advertise the land cause people would fill the land. They did Project Stardust to increase the size of walkways because they anticipated huge crowds to fill the park, and then nothing. They saw practically the same attendance as before it opened, if not worse. If they just wanted to maintain crowd levels why open up areas of the park and spend all the time and money widening walkways and removing planters for the same crowd levels? Sure I'm not saying I know exactly what Disney wanted but to try and claim they just wanted to keep attendance levels the same and add all this land to existing crowd levels is a silly claim given everything around the opening of the land, there's no doubt they wanted to increase attendance and see a huge influx. Yeah the lightsabers and bar were booked constantly but that's not hard to do considering how abysmally low the number of people they could fit a day is, same with RotR.
You have to admit none of this rhetoric matches with what Disney was claiming would happen. They were talking about how packed to the gills the park would be with people visiting their new billion dollar land, they placed CM restrictions on attendance and tried to limit how many people were gonna come to the park. Then they saw a big wave of people during the reservation period of the land the month it opened, then when it opened to everyone they saw everyone who really cared already went and nobody was flooding the land so they lifted restrictions and made promotions to get more people into the park just months after adding the biggest expansion to Disneyland. They did not expect this to happen, they failed in their original plans for the land and have since done what Disney always does and tries to change the narrative and claim that they did exactly what they wanted. Even if that was true that's a horrible business model: spend a billion dollars on a new land just to have the same attendance numbers and with all that money and land used they just want to sell $200 lightsabers and some merch and overpriced drinks at Oga's Cantina. They could have made a much much smaller area and put those money making experiences in there and spent less money for the same profit. I'm not claiming Disney has absolutely fallen on its face with GE and that it was a complete failure, I'm just stating that Disney expected the opening of the land to go much different and now they're making different claims and trying to save face.
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