Magic Kingdom opened in 1971 as the iconic centerpiece of the “Vacation Kingdom of the World.” But just eleven years later, EPCOT Center joined the lineup, creating in Walt Disney World a jaw-dropping multi-park destination. And if you can believe it, it was just seven years after that that The Disney-MGM Studios opened, besting Universal’s race to enter the Orlando market and making Walt Disney World the home of three separate theme parks. And even though the opening of the Disney-MGM Studios may feel like ancient history, it was just nine years later that Disney’s Animal Kingdom debuted as the first 21st century theme park developed with a whole new mindset of immersion.
Obviously, the timeline of Walt Disney World’s history – from a single theme park and two hotels around the Seven Seas Lagoon to a sprawling, behemoth, gargantuan, international destination packed with four theme parks, two water parks, two dozen hotels, hundreds of miles of roadways, and multiple interconnected transit systems spread across a San Francisco-sized property – is awe-inspiring.
But more to today’s point, isn’t it interesting that nearly all of that development took place in the first half of the resort’s 50 year history? Think about it: in roughly its first 25 years, Walt Disney World opened four theme parks. In its second 25 years, it’s opened… well… none. Big picture wise, Walt Disney World in 1999 (above) looks pretty much like Walt Disney World today!
Don’t misunderstand… for decades, fans have speculated over what Walt Disney World’s imaginary “Fifth Gate” could be. Rumors of a Villians-themed park made the rounds in the 2000s; an evening-only “Night Kingdom” was the subject of much discussion board fodder in the 2010s…
…after Disney acquired Lucasfilm, fans went wild for a idea of a highly-immersive, limited attendance Star Wars-themed boutique park (which, in some ways, came to be with the one-two punch of Galaxy’s Edge and the Galactic Starcruiser experience).
And listen – “armchair Imagineering” a Fifth Gate is a time-honored tradition among Disney Parks fans. It’s even likely that explorations into potential new parks have been tossed around at Imagineering. Disney World has been so firmly associated with four theme parks for so long that Cinderella Castle, Spaceship Earth, the Hollywood Tower Hotel, and the Tree of Life are pretty much baked into pop culture imagery. Imagining what that fifth piece could be is exciting! But let’s be clear: if you’re holding your breath waiting for a fifth theme park at Walt Disney World… don’t. Here are a few reasons why…
1. Walt Disney World is largely viewed as “mature”
There’s a reason that Disney World hasn’t added a new theme park since 1998, nor a waterpark since 1995. It’s because Disney World is viewed as a largely “mature” enterprise; one whose growth phase is behind it, and that has now settled into a very nice, steady, and respectable status quo. This perspective imagines Walt Disney World as something of a “Goldilocks” with just the right amount of things to do – enough for a once-a-year family from the Midwest to stay five nights with a four day ticket, but enough for a British family to stay on-property for two weeks without getting bored.
Being viewed as “mature” doesn’t mean Walt Disney World is doomed to stagnate. New rides like Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, and TRON Lightcycle Power Run demonstrate that investment will forever be poured into keeping Disney World’s offerings fresh and its parks stocked with new things to do. Likewise, bold additions like the Skyliner and Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser offer glimpses into the audacious mindset that Michael Eisner brought in the ’80s and ’90s, creating the Walt Disney World we know today.
But structurally, Disney World is clearly in the midst of a “settled” era that puts the parks in a mindset of optimization. (Which, under previous CEO Bob Chapek at least, meant rotating entertainment, meet-and-greets, limited-release merchandise, franchise-focused promotions, and pulsing more Disney + Pixar + Marvel + Star Wars in lower-cost overlays like Pixar Pier, Mission: BREAKOUT, Journey of Water, Mary Poppins meet-and-greets, and more.)
Meanwhile, expansion is reserved for what many call the true core business of Disney World: hotel occupancy and real estate interests. (In other words, we’re likely to continue seeing hotel inventory and DVC inventory expand, even as the parks’ capacity remains quite steady.)
2. Disney World needs to fix its second, third, and fourth parks first
Though our reasoning here may send Disney World fans racing to the comments, there’s an undeniable truth that we all have to face as Disney Parks fans: EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom all need a whole lot of love. Actually, we tried to put into words what we’d prioritize for each park to succeed in the long-run, but one unavoidable truth about Disney World’s second, third, and fourth gate is that they desperately need more rides. It’s shocking how far down on our Ride Count Countdown Disney World’s parks rank – so much so that Disneyland’s two theme parks together contain more rides than all four of Disney World’s combined. That’s not good.
So imagine if Disney announced a concept park like Disney’s Fantastic Worlds – a park with lands dedicated to Moana, The Avengers, Big Hero 6, TRON, and more were en route to Florida. Obviously it would be international news for the general public and “Break the Internet” level news for theme park fans.
But surely, as the daze wore off, cooler heads would prevail and fans would begin to say, “Wait a second… instead of Big Hero 6 and Moana lands in a new park, why not add them to Hollywood Studios where they’re needed? Why dump hundreds of millions of dollars into a fifth theme park when Animal Kingdom has only eight rides? Are you really going to build a fifth theme park with EPCOT still in shambles?” In other words, Disney World already has three parks with varying, debilitating needs and “half-day” status… That’s where the investment needs to go, not yet another theme park.
The question is, are Walt Disney World’s other parks – particularly its second, third, and fourth – so “complete” that investment can be funneled into a fifth? Of course even the most die-hard Disney fans would have to concede that they’re not… which, to our thinking, means that a fifth gate isn’t called for.
As a thought experiment, we sort of asked the same thing about Universal Orlando and its new theme park: is Epic Universe going to spread the resort too thin? After all, while we love the idea of a Super Nintendo World, and a Universal Classic Monsters land, and a How To Train Your Dragon land, at some point you have to go, “Wait a second… those lands and / or that budget would actually be great fits for your two existing parks, both of which need that love!” While a third park is exciting, what if those concepts and that money were instead used to build-out the existing two parks? Which brings us to another point…
3. A new gate could “cannibalize” another
Just because a single theme park draws 1 million guests doesn’t mean that adding a second park will bring 2 million, much less than a third will total out to 3 million, etc. If Walt Disney World had 100 theme parks, chances are that each would be very, very lightly attended. At some point, lots of variables (not the least of which being the “base” of how many guests can afford your parks and want to visit them) will see attendance plateau no matter how many offerings you’ve got.
This isn’t unprecedented. Attendance at EPCOT dipped significantly in the years after the Disney-MGM Studios’ opening, and attendance at both of those parks fell when Animal Kingdom opened. That’s why metrics like length-of-stay matter, and why factors like ticket upgrades and revenue-generating programs pad the bottom line. But ultimately, the worst thing that can happen is “cannibalization.” In effect, that your new park merely “eats away” at attendance elsewhere.
Actually, Disney and Universal go to great lengths to ensure that this doesn’t happen. In small ways, you can see it in incentivizing multi-day tickets with “longer you stay, less you pay per day” deals to the Park Reservation system that artificially forced an attendance spread among parks. You can also see it in the development cycles that equip each park with a “must-see” attraction, ensuring it’s easier to add a day than to pick a park to skip.
Those factors help mitigate one park gobbling up the rest, but if your offerings are too many, it’s inevitable. We mentioned the very possible (but hopefully, unlikely) scenario that when Universal Orlando opens its third theme park, instead of seeing attendance and length-of-stay increase, they find that guests actually just replace at day at Universal Studios Florida with a day at Epic Universe.
Obviously, that would be a massive disappointment, suggesting that Universal Orlando was actually “right-sized” with two theme parks, and that a billion-dollar third gate merely redistributed the guests they were already drawing, amounting to huge financial losses and a strategic error. (To “correct” that will require years of expansion and rebalancing.)
If Disney is under the impression that its Florida resort is “mature” and right-sized, then adding a fifth park would be a very dumb financial and strategic move.
4. Disneyland has more immediate growth potential
It’s popular to imagine that Disneyland Resort is a teeny tiny little blip on the Disney Parks scale, or that Walt’s original park is still part of the conversation based only on a sense of duty or nostalgia. Disneyland is sometimes called “the world’s most popular regional theme park,” given that so much of its attendance (and appeal) lies in its “local and vocal” audience, its Southern-Californian roots, and its generations-long role in the region – so much so that pre-pandemic, Annual Passholders reportedly made up for more than half of the park’s visitors on any given day.
But zooming out, we should acknowledge that Disneyland is an absolute behemoth. AECOM’s 2021 theme park attendance approximations suggest that after years on the rise, Walt’s original little Disneyland has firmly beat out even Tokyo Disneyland (which resides in one of the largest cities on Earth) to become the number two most-attended theme park on Earth (second only to its little sister, the permanently-first Magic Kingdom). Though it’s taken a while for Disney California Adventure to carry its own weight, Disneyland’s second gate now hosts more visitors each year than Disneyland Paris and is nearly as “built-out” as it’s likely to become.
Before the pandemic, it seemed that Disneyland could announce a third park any day (and indeed, in retrospect, Galaxy’s Edge and Avengers Campus would’ve been a great foundation for one, and in the opposite of Disney World’s problem, probably should’ve broken away from the the already-full parks they were shoehorned into). Frankly, all that’s kept Disneyland from expanding is space and politics. Though a likely site for a third gate has long been identified (via a blacktop parking lot a few blocks from the existing parks), such large scale construction in Southern California requires Disney, the City of Anaheim, the State of California, and lots and lots of neighbors to be willing to participate.
Even post-pandemic, Disney launched the “DisneylandForward” initiative – essentially, a positive pressure campaign meant to convince local authorities to revise zoning restrictions within Disney’s property. Disney’s lightly-sketched example of what they could do if provided the rezoning they seek (above) makes it clear that among Disney’s U.S.-based resorts, Disneyland has the most growth potential.
Obviously, the Anaheim resort will never approach rivaling its younger sister in size, but it’s clear that Disneyland is far more than just a nostalgic left-behind that Disney operates out of goodwill. It’s got incredible potential and is on a long-term growth trajectory based on the supposition that it is not “mature” quite yet…
And that’s not the only place Disney sees potential…
5. There are new markets to explore
331 million people live in the United States. 80% of them are concentrated east of the Mississippi River. That gives Walt Disney World in particular a massive potential domestic audience, not to mention the tens of millions of people outside of the United States that bypass closer resorts and instead count the “Vacation Kingdom of the World” among their must-visit global destinations. Still, 331 million people “sharing” six Disney Parks amounts to 1 park for every 55 million people.
Of course, putting that number into a new perspective is the population of China – 1.4 billion, or roughly four times that of the United States. The city of Shanghai alone is home to 26 million residents – three times as many as the USA’s largest city, New York, and more than the 22 million-person population of the entire state of Florida. Alongside a whole lot of downsides, Shanghai offered Disney substantial real estate, efficient mass transit, and a massive population…
But it’s not just the size of China’s population; it’s that the country’s rapidly-developing Middle Class and the unusually-permissive government’s allowance of Disney films has blown the cork out of an untapped market for Parks, Experiences, and Products. Though hampered with political strife, censorship, and humanitarian issues, it’s really no surprise that Disney has waded into the waters of China where literally billions of people are newly-accessible to their “synergy machine.”
So in a global economy (and as an international media conglomerate), you have to imagine that more than ever, Disney’s sights are set beyond the United States. If, indeed, Disney World is “mature,” and if its existing parks need investment, and if people are going to come to Disney World anyway, than it would be quite silly to build a fifth gate in Florida, or in Texas, or in Chicago.
For better or worse, Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products will continue to experiment with ways to connect with hitherto-untouched audiences in places like China. Talk about bang for your buck. Americans already claim six of the twelve Disney Parks on Earth… but chances are that their 50% share will slowly decline over the next half-century as new Disneylands meet new markets that a fifth park in Florida could never approach.
