One of the biggest supergiants in the entertainment industry, Disney, is struggling with decreased demand for their amusement parks. It’s not only Disney’s amusement parks which are down in ticket sales, across the world people are going to amusement parks less. Disney has the highest amusement park ticket sales around the world, with Magic Kingdom and Disneyland Anaheim leading with around 17 million ticket sales per year. Disney’s amusement parks got a 2% increase in revenue but a 3% decrease in operating profit. This isn’t great for the company as they were planning to spend $60 billion over the next decade to expand their amusement parks and cruises. It’s another worry for Disney as their amusement parks have historically covered big losses for the company like Disney+ (which just started making profit this year) and the Disney Channel. Disney experiences, which are theme parks and cruises, make up 70% of Disney’s operating profit.
Some explanations for the decreased demand for theme parks is that Americans just have less money. Lower-income individuals are feeling stressed and not spending as much on non-essential goods. Higher-income individuals would rather travel internationally or have just shifted their spending away from theme parks. Since Covid, there has been a normalization of demand. The post-Covid travel surge is over and there is currently a fear of recession. Overall, demand has just softened across Universal and other entertainment companies as well. This is an indication as to a possible affect Covid has had on consumer demand and a lot of companies won’t get the same demand as they did before the pandemic.