Walt Disney World’s much-touted 50th Anniversary celebration ended as it began – with a resounding thud. Despite being a landmark anniversary for Disney’s flagship Floridian resort, “The World’s Most Magical Celebration” left the public, critics, and even Disney’s most ardent defenders feeling less than enthusiastic. Sure, you can blame the countless delays, cancellations, and closures brought on by the pandemic… but as we’ve explored, Disney also made matters much worse in 2021 by slashing perks and adding upcharges, opening copy-paste nighttime shows, and fundamentally forgetting to celebrate Walt Disney World itself in favor of a post-2000s, IP-focused promotion.
Suffice it to say that Disney has a lot of course-correction to do if it wants to win back good will lost to a 50th that fell flat. Luckily, like a white knight riding over the horizon, Disney100 is here as the latest in Disney’s park-wide promotional campaigns. Commemorating “100 Years of Wonder” (since the founding of what would eventually become The Walt Disney Company), the Disney100 promotion actually kicked off at Disneyland in with a handful of astounding new experiences, shows, and attractions back in January. With the 50th now concluded in Florida, Disney World is finally getting in on the action, too.
But if Disney really wanted to spend the remainder of 2023 and the Disney100 promotion resetting itself for the next century, then we have some ideas for how Walt Disney World can serve as a centerpiece of a new era…
1. If this is a celebration, then celebrate it!
Typically, Disney tends to choose one of its four parks to anchor seasonal celebrations and promotions. Weirdly, the “Disney100” campaign doesn’t really seem to have a “home” at Disney World. So far, it’s basically amounted to metallic, iridescent “100” marquees appearing at each park’s entrance, and not much else. Instead, the resort’s mailers, marketing, and website have switched from 50th messaging to a “Can’t Miss Thrills” promo, allowing them to co-market Cosmic Rewind and TRON Lightcycle Run.
Maybe it’s that the 50th exhausted the resort’s reserves for overlays and temporary offerings. Maybe it’s that Disney World is content to let Disneyland serve as this promotion’s international headquarters. Maybe it’s just that Disney World is feeling “down and out” with nothing new to debut this year besides the much-delayed Moana walkthrough at EPCOT.
It’s a little sad to see Disney World do so little for the 100th, seemingly not even able to muster the strength to heavily promote the merchandise and snack packages that are flying off the shelves at Disneyland. Many expected that the 50 golden character statues deployed across Disney World for the 50th would swiftly be painted platinum and have their “50” insignias covered with “100” medallions. But… nope. It’s a little odd to see the resort so… tuned out.
Granted, while most Disney Parks promotional campaigns tend to last 18 months or more, Disney100 is a company wide initiative. It could be that the promotion really will end on December 31, 2023. In that case, maybe Disney World’s late entry into the celebration means it’s just not banking too much on it. Even the one project for the resort that is Disney100 related feels last minute…
2. Make sure that EPCOT show is a winner
Inevitable as it might have been, fans were still shellshocked when EPCOT’s long-running nighttime spectacular masterpiece – “Illuminations: Reflections of Earth” – was decommissioned in 2019. The show’s replacement – “EPCOT Forever” – was always meant to be a temporary fill-in before the park could launch a true follow-up… “Harmonious.”
By its 2021 debut, cartoon characters overtaking World Showcase was a battle long ago lost, and in many ways it made sense for Disney to draw from its catalogue of internationally-set fables to build a show about how music brings us together. But “Harmonious” was controversial for several reasons. The most obvious was its hardware – five massive LED-screen barges permanently moored in World Showcase lagoon. Though “Harmonious” was doubtlessly designed and budgeted to play for at least a decade, the show is currently being disassembled after less than 18 months… a massive, embarrassing, costly mistake for Disney.
Clearly making it up as they go, Disney swiftly announced that “Harmonious” would end its run (pretending, of course, that they’d always meant for the incredibly expensive, hardware-intensive show to only last 18 months) and that “EPCOT Forever” would return as a placeholder again, bridging the gap to another follow-up called… well… we don’t know… and it’s possible Disney doesn’t, either. Even though they’re playing it off like it’s all intentional, we know that Disney didn’t expect to need to come up with another nighttime show for EPCOT until the decision to end “Harmonious” was made.
Behind the scenes, Disney Entertainment has to be sweating, and the vague PR promises that the next nighttime show for the park one would tie into Disney100 are becoming difficult to believe since the promotion will probably end in eight months and we don’t even have a name for it… just the abstract concept art above. That seems like very bad news, because Disney needs this show not just to work, but to stick. Fans revolted against the end of “Illuminations,” which was still beloved after 20 years. Given that Disney is on to its fourth show in the six years since, it sounds like they were right…
But our biggest recommendations are on the next page…
3. Do something about Genie+
When the 50th began and visitors unanimously reported burning, roiling hatred of the paid-for-line-skipping-system Genie+, it seemed possible that Disney would save face by officially axing the system when the anniversary celebration ended – likely by pretending they’d always meant for it to be a temporary “exciting offering” tied to the 50th. Those fantasies are over. Let’s face it; it seems highly unlikely that you will ever again get “priority boarding” on Flight of Passage at Disney World without paying for it.
Especially as Disney tries to make its streaming service perpetually profitable (a venture that approximately no company has yet succeeded in), Disney’s highly profitable Parks, Experiences, & Products department will pick up the slack… and since paid-for line-skipping is industry standard, remembering “the good ole days” of free FastPass is about all that fans can do. But that doesn’t mean Disney is stuck with Genie+.
It would be nice if, even just for the Disney100 celebration, Disney tried something new. Make Genie+ free to all while keeping Individual Lightning Lanes as paid-for add-ons; use Disneyland’s system, which activates once you enter the park instead of at the ridiculous 7 AM wake-up; return to FastPass+ with week-out bookings for $10/day; abolish it all and offer just Universal Express-style $200 once-per-ride line-skip passes, leaving fast-moving Stand-by lines for the rest of us. With good will tanking and guest experience suffering, fans are returning home and telling everyone they know how ridiculously awful Genie+ is… and if it doesn’t disappear, soon those guests will.
4. Bring back… everything else that’s been taken away
Everyone knows that Disney Parks have had a big “takeaway” problem over the last few years. The hard stop of the pandemic gave Disney the cover it needed to kill nearly every “free” (that is, included) perk and benefit of visiting a Disney Park or staying at an on-site hotel. We tracked the end of eight services that – for many – meant that the “Disney bubble” had officially, irrevocably burst.
Millions of guests have felt the increased prices and lowered standards that have hit the parks post-pandemic – most of them coming home to tell friends and family how outrageously expensive Disney World has gotten, and how your day is filled with app-based micro-transactions. More troublingly, though, millions more don’t yet know that the next time they visit Disney World, they won’t get Magical Express airport transportation, FastPass, free MagicBands, or package delivery that literally amount to hundreds and hundreds of dollars in added expense for a family, on top of ever-rising park admission, airfare, and rental car prices.
Disney CEO Bob Iger has admitted that in their “zeal to grow profit,” Disney was “too aggressive” in their pricing schemes over the last few years… and to be fair, in January 2023, the company officially returned free parking to guests of Disney World’s hotels. But the laundry list of services pulled out from under guests goes much, much deeper, and with Disney netting $3 billion in profit last fiscal year, guests who keep the Parks division absurdly profitable seem justified in suggesting that they deserve those perks back.
5. Face the future
In a 2023 shareholders meeting, Bob Iger reported that Disney planned to spend $17 billion over the next ten years at Walt Disney World. It’s an impressive figure, even when you recognize that that includes all of the infrastructure work Disney undertakes in Florida, the cost of ever-expanding hotel and DVC inventory, and that it’s about equivalent to the amount Disney spent in Florida over the last ten years.
Still, even assuming that amount will be divvied up in the same portions as it was over the last decade, that would likely still mean several high-profile new “lands” with major attractions, several reimagined or overlayed attractions, and rotating entertainment and shows, too. For sure, some of those projects haven’t even been dreamed of yet. Many more are early on in the “Blue Sky” development process and may never come to be. Trust us, after the 2022 D23 Expo and its announcements of maybe-sorta-kinda-one-day-just-putting-it-out-there lands, fans don’t need teased.
But it does make sense to start making Disney World’s next steps public. As it is, the D23 Expo in 2022 was memorable for being the first in history in which zero new rides were announced. None. Instead of painting a picture of where Disney was headed, the Parks Panel left fans scrambling to figure out if Disney was going anywhere, leaving the already-announced 2024’s Tiana’s Bayou Adventure as the farthest-out project on Disney’s public schedule. That was par for the course for Chapek’s era.
But it would be nice to see Imagineering empowered and some real, concrete plans come together. Disney100 isn’t just the conclusion of Disney’s first century; it’s the launch of its next. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show fans where Disney is going, and how it’s going to get there. Big, bold, ambitious, timeless projects might lie ahead… but we don’t know. And to get fans back on Disney’s side, Disney100 serves as a perfect excuse to reorient, reintroduce, and redirect Disney World into the future…
