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An emphasis on microtransactions and questionable cost cutting are among their concerns.
Photo: Handout/Getty Images
You can exhale now, Bob Iger. This week, Disney named Josh D’Amaro as its next CEO, and he will be taking the Mickey mantle in March. As we noted earlier this week, the future head of a multibillion-dollar company making TV shows and movies has “no real experience making TV shows and movies.” He has, however, worked at Disney for 28 years, most recently as chairman of Disney Experiences, so in some ways, D’Amaro is Mister Experience. Crowning the guy who runs Disney’s theme parks, cruise ships, and hotels to head the entire company telegraphs how the megacorporation envisions its future; it is one of the last major Hollywood studios, but it might see other arms of its business as bigger priorities. You would think theme-park heads would welcome the news, but on Reddit and Twitter, Disney adults are raising concerns. If D’Amaro is going to run the Studios the way he runs the Parks, then it’s worth looking into why, exactly, fans of Disney World and Disneyland might be upset.
For decades, Disney Parks’ FastPass system was free to all theme-park guests, allowing them to nab passes (first paper, then digital) to wait in shorter lines for rides and attractions. It was a perk available to all who could get past the learning curve. In 2021, one year into D’Amaro’s tenure and following COVID shutdowns, Disney did away with FastPass and introduced a confounding and very costly series of pay-to-skip passes, which require timing advanced booking of limited slots in these formerly free-to-enter shorter lines. Lightning Lane Multi Passes, for example, can cost over $40 a day to skip the lines on certain attractions sorted into different tiers, excluding the best and busiest ones, which will require a Lightning Lane Single Pass (those range from $12 to over $20 per attraction). If the thought of staring at your phone all day at Disneyland, frantically booking ride slots like you’re using Resy, sounds horrible, you can now also buy a Lightning Lane Premiere Pass, which ranges from $129 to $449, per person, per day, plus tax, on top of your park tickets. On the busiest days, such as holidays, at the most popular parks like the Magic Kingdom and Disneyland, these baseline tickets can now cost over $200.
Now imagine doing this for a family of four on a three-day vacation. And imagine how expensive that vacation already is, as over the past few years, Disney has stripped away additional perks like the airport bus service and extended park hours, in favor of more points of purchase and labor-cost savings. The emphasis on microtransactions makes it so that the wealthy can afford to skip lines, creates hours-long waits for everyone else, and incentivizes even more people to pay up out of desperation and to make their limited time in the parks “worth it.” Defunctland has a brilliant video about how this experience is ruining theme parks for visitors, although it’s clear to see why Disney loves this model. Could D’Amaro be planning to apply these extractive pricing strategies to more products at the company? It’s not a stretch to imagine Disney+ adding an upcharge to stream Andor during “peak hours” or something.
Last year, Disney made the decision to tear down Jim Henson’s final completed work, a testament to the American pioneer’s humor and innovation, Muppet*Vision 3D, to replace it with a Monsters, Inc.–themed ride, despite there being so much underused space in that particular theme park, Disney’s Hollywood Studios. D’Amaro has since voiced his commitment to the Muppets, but it will be hard to overcome him overseeing this moment of betrayal to the Muppet community. The past few years have seen Imagineers’ artistic vision and thematic cohesion stripped away from parks like Epcot and Animal Kingdom in the name of making room for more profitable IP, in less thoughtfully executed attractions. Along the way, Disney’s attention to detail and historic trust in Imagineers like Joe Rhode has been decimated, and does not bode well for how much free rein Disney will or will not allow its creatives across divisions.
Whatever kind of slump you think the Marvel Cinematic Universe is in, Marvel’s Disneyland Universe has it worse. Under D’Amaro, Disney opened Avengers Campus in Disney’s California Adventure, and it is the sorriest concrete wasteland ever seen in a theme park: It demonstrates a callous cost-cutting approach in how Disney builds new major projects from the ground up — slapping logos on architecture that resembles an industrial business park. Under D’Amaro’s tenure, it wasn’t about creating a delightful atmosphere so long as the profitable IP was represented in the most perfunctory way possible. You can see the same turn away from ambition and whimsy in the newest Disney Resort hotels and in sad, airport Holiday Inn–level renovations of their existing hotels, compared to the mad creativity and beauty of the Michael Eisner era.
To be fair, D’Amaro is not single-handedly responsible for any of these Disney Parks’ problems. But it is hard to point to particularly amazing things that have happened in Disney Experiences under his reign: The two new coasters that have opened in Walt Disney World in the past five years are excellent additions, and they’ve vastly expanded the cruise-ship fleet, if that’s your speed. But do those wins say anything about how he will run such a vast entertainment company?
He did get Michael Eisner’s seal of approval, as the Old Master declared D’Amaro to be a “wise pick” and cautioned him to “keep close the words of Walt Disney: ‘We love to entertain kings and queens, but the vital thing to remember is this — every guest receives the VIP treatment.’” I will take that as subtle Lightning Lane shade. Eisner also points at the promotion of Dana Walden to president and chief creative officer as great news for the company. If the new CEO and his leadership can heed this advice, maybe the future of Disney still holds a great, big, beautiful D’Amaro.
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Rebecca Alter
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