Walt Disney World Investments SLASHED!!!
Oops. Bob Iger’s supporters said the quiet part out loud.
The Disney Company has released an editorial reply to Nelson Peltz and Trian’s white paper. Mickey and Great and Terrible’s own white paper is kind of an embarrassment.
Disney seems to have convinced itself its financial legerdemain is so brilliant no one could hope to penetrate it. Well, I did, and so did anybody else that wasn’t high on Pixie-Dust.
One of Bob Iger’s big claims for the park is that he is turbo-charging investments in the parks by $60 billion. At the time I said not to be fooled by it. Disney Parks costs approx $600 million a year to run, so this is just a normal budget for Disney Parks. Most of the spending is loaded towards the backend of the ten years, which means that given the current rate of inflation, it is effectively a funding cut.
However, it was a lot worse than I thought. Disney’s white paper released a helpful and horrifying graph.
Tech and maintenance were rolled into that investment. Cruise ships were rolled in with the parks.
But this graph also shows, only half of the funding is actually going into parks.
The rumors that are coming out of Burbank are honestly shocking because the story is that Disney executives are now saying it’s okay if Disney Parks come in behind Universal. For reasons.
Reasons to follow.
It sounds to me like Disney Burbank is accepting the fact that they train-wrecked Imagineering. The truth is that well-functioning company is a community. When you move that company… Especially cross-country you will absolutely destroy that company’s culture. I’ve seen it repeatedly in my life. It always happens.
When you have a massively dysfunctional company like Twitter, then destorying that culture is the right thing to do. But when that company is a well oiled-machine like Imagineering you are rolling the dice on disaster.
When Walt Disney was running things out of the building where he made Snow White, his animation studio was a tight knit group. Shortly after moving them to Burbank the Animator’s Strike shutdown the company, and everyone at the company said the change started after the move.
In moving Imagineering Disney shattered the culture that made it special. Admittedly, shoving out all of the old white men wasn’t a big help either. Now, with the exception of Bruce Vaugn, they are all working for Disney’s competition.
The sad, yet simple truth is that Bob Iger gambled big on Fox Studios and lost. He gambled on Disney+ and it’s an even bigger disaster for the company than Eisener’s attempt to create an internet portal in the early 2000s with Go.com. Disney is so many billions in debt that it will never recover from his fuck ups.
And worst of all, Disney is a company where no one can ever admit to a mistake.
The part of Disney that needs to move wasn’t Imagineering. It is corporate headquarters in Burbank because that is culture that needs to be scattered to the four winds.
