Here is why Walt Disney World isn't building a fifth theme park

Excellent analysis/explanation.

Spot on. Epic may have caused an attendance drop in the short-term, but the benefits of being able to market themselves as a resort with three real theme parks will do wonders as Universal develops.

If Iger and his team could take a Time Rover back to the 90s, would they put the kibosh on even building the fourth Orlando park? With hindsight we know neither of the then Busch parks were the Mouse’s biggest competition in central Florida. And Pandora, Tropical Americas and Expedition Everest could all have found a home in Epcot or Studios without the costly exotic animal exhibits and pricey infrastructure.

As disappointing as it is, this makes sense.

If Disney isn't interested in making an entire portals park comprised of separate immersive worlds, like Epic Universe, I don't see a fifth park in the future, unless some new park concept arises that's so compelling that Disney decides it must throw its hat in the ring with its own park built on that new concept.

There's something about a fifth park that would make the resort feel more complete to me. Plus, there's the tens of thousands of new jobs an entire new park creates.

I'm hoping that Disney will at least consider a new "minor park" as they're allowed to build two more. Maybe a new water park to challenge Volcano Bay?

Robert, you seem to have your finger on the pulse of theme park visitors. Yet, all of this talk about new attractions is lost on me. I'm a nostalgia guy and a huge amount of Disney theme parks are made for people like me. I take my grandchildren to the same places that my parents took me, eat at the same restaurants, ride the same rides. I can't do that in a new park but I can in an existing park that happen to get new lands.

Robert: Granted, Disney is facing a bit of this challenge this year and next, as Tropical Americas will not open until 2027. That's why Disney is hyping a bunch of relatively minor additions and changes in the year ahead, including the new Muppets theme on Rock 'n' Roller Coaster, a new Soarin' film, and the makeover of the former Animation Courtyard at the Studios.

Me: Yeah. Disney is playing "small ball" and they are doing it really well.

Hasn't someone been posting that on TPI lately?

And no doubt Robert delivered a great piece on the prospect of a seventh (maybe call it "eighth") gate at WDW. But I think that "hyping" was a poor choice of words. "Opening", "marketing" or "promoting" would have been a way of maintaining a greater degree of objectivity.

I don't really need another Disney park in Florida. They have the perfect amount as-is that could just use some plussing. If Disneyland can always find creative ways to expand their footprint, there's no reason Disney World can't do the same. Plus, adding another park means you need to really beef up on staffing (attractions, food, shops, custodial, entertainment, etc.).

If a theme park resort is expecting to be able to grow their overall attendance by 50+% with the addition of a new gate, a loss of 5-10% the year before isn't going to deter them. I think the answer is a lot more straightforward: Walt Disney World simply can't benefit from a fifth gate. Right now, Walt Disney World is a six to eight night vacation for a majority of their visitors, and the potential pool of guests who would want to and be able to visit for a longer duration simply isn't very large. If guests aren't going to buy an additional ticket for the new park and instead will swap out a day at a different park, the opportunity for return on investment is pretty minimal. Additionally, Animal Kingdom is still a half day park for most guests, and both Epcot and Hollywood Studios offer incomplete attraction lineups, so there are a lot of spaces within the existing parks to pull in guests who aren't currently interested in visiting rather than having to commit to a whole new park to pull them in.

By comparison, Universal has generally been a three to five night trip for those doing a Universal specific vacation. With the new park, Universal is now likely to get an extra night out of most visitors in that group, plus it gives them much better odds of luring Disney vacationers away for a couple days. The addition of several popular IPs mean the new park ensure that it offers attractions for groups with diverse interests, rather than courting one group at a time if they were to add the lands one by one to the existing parks. Could they have been successful going that route? Yeah, but if you're able to score secondary revenue by going all out, why not swing for the fences?

I think it's pretty simple. WDW has reached critical mass in terms of what the average guest can do during a visit. Adding another theme park is unlikely to increase overall resort attendance, even though it would increase capacity. The typical WDW guest doesn't vacation more than 1 week, and often stays less because they want to reserve a day or 2 for Universal or other area attractions. So if WDW were to add a brand new gate, the chances are that most guests would replace a day they would have spent in one of the legacy parks with a day in the new park. However, by making improvements/expansions to the existing theme parks, WDW is able to keep people coming back to visit the new attractions alongside their old favorites. This allows Disney to make spot improvements to their current parks at a much lower cost than it would be to build (and market) an all new park.

Ultimately for Disney, the juice (cost of a new park) is just not worth the squeeze since there's only so much the resort can grow. It really doesn't have anything to do with timing as Robert notes, because whether all of these new additions open in the same year or are deliberately staggered over multiple years, the impact will be the same, which is to increase the capacity and interest in the existing theme park instead of undercutting the legacy parks' popularity with a new park.

Good points made. I'd argue a fifth gate as better to have a Cars land there than bulldoze Rivers of America and remake Frontierland. Yet I see the logic in how there could be too much for some vacationers and not get the full WDW experience. Adding stuff over time does show Disney plays the long game better and likley succeeding with it.

I think more importantly I the amount of leave you Americans have wouldn’t support it. Disney is already a full week destination. If you guys had 5.6 weeks leave per year like those who have benefited from EU law, then building into the second week of a trip makes sense, but adding another destination becomes an “or” proposition, not an “and”

@Chad H - And that's really the point, because Disney could absolutely build another very successful theme park in Orlando (and as MikeW astutely notes would be better served to apply some of the new attractions on the horizon - they could probably build a Pixar park with Zootopia, Monster's Inc, Cars, Coco, etc), but while it would almost certainly result in an overall increase in WDW attendance, the impact of a new park is going to be less than making individual additions in the existing parks.

In other words, let's say a new park with 5 e-ticket attractions is going to draw 10 million in its opening year. However, since those 5 e-tickets are in a new park, they wouldn't be added to the legacy parks, causing them to flatline. If you assume each of those 5 e-tickets (for argument's sake let's take Cars, Villains, Monsters, Encanto, and Indy) are worth an 8-10% increase if added to their respective parks, that equates to 1.4-1.8 million (for each Villains and Cars), 0.8 to 1 million (for Monsters), 0.7-0.8 million (for each Encanto and Indy) or a total attendance bump of 5-6.2 million across all of WDW. That means of the 10 million people a new park would attract, over HALF of that would come from the existing parks with the remainder presumably from organic growth (typically 2-3%) and from guests changing a day they would have spent outside of WDW to the new park (from the competition). I know this is a pretty simplistic model, but it clearly shows why it just doesn't make sense right now for Disney to build another Orlando park, especially when the new additions are going to dramatically increase the capacity and popularity of the existing parks. The costs to build a new park, probably 50-70% more than the individual attractions being added as part of this current wave of additions, would take a decade or more to pay for themselves in a new park versus 3-5 years in existing parks.

Again, it made sense for Universal to build Epic as a way for them to carve out UO as a "full week/vacation" destination as a complete alternative to WDW - and there's already evidence to suggest that they've undercut their own business with Epic. Another WDW park would undercut the existing parks even more than Epic has done to UO, and with room in their parks to expand their capacity and appeal (a luxury that Universal doesn't have in abundance - though they are clearly working to free up and better utilize their space), Disney's decision to not add another theme park makes complete sense from a purely financial standpoint. Disney will get far more ROI optimizing their existing parks than the massive expense of a new park.

They may end up okay in the long run, but the Roberts family can't be thrilled with the short term results from Epic. As Chad H pointed out, the lack of vacation time afforded American families limits the market for a week long amusement park destination. UO being a 3-5 day resort was a darn good spot to be in an overbuilt Central Florida theme park market. Kabletown could/should have invested a fraction of the 6-7 billion spent on Epic putting Ministry and Nintendo into Studios and Dark Universe and How to Train Your Dragon into Islands, solidifying their existing parks while limiting either a small or big ball response from the Mouse.

It's looking more and more like Epic was Comcast getting out over its skis ... Volcano Bay was a bad idea. They could've sky-linered that slice of land, expanded IOA and added monsters, Potter and Nintendo -- while still developing the warehouse/operations center along Sand Lake Road.

@TH - What makes you think VB was a "bad idea"? Is it because they dropped TapuTapu or because they're doing their first off-season closure for maintenance?

I would tend to agree that Universal probably got "over its skis" because they made the decision to open a new park with attractions that probably could have worked in their legacy parks. Now Universal has a third traditional park to maintain while trying to get IOA and USF back up to par, which is undoubtedly costing them a lot of money. However, if, as you suggested long ago, Universal had simultaneously address the shortcomings of IOA and USF while they were also building Epic, they would be in a much better position right now. You could argue that the Pandemic played a role in decisions that were made between 2020 and 2023, but there's no doubt that Universal is playing catch up on how they wanted Universal Orlando to look and function following Epic's debut and now having to react to the goliath down the street announcing a wave of additions that could stunt any momentum Universal has gained and might additionally gain with improvements to their legacy parks.

The Disney expansion was under Eisner who wanted guests to spend every minute of every day at WDW and every dollar in Disney tills that's why he built Studios to stop people going to Universal, that's why he built the Living Seas to stop people going to SeaWorld, that's why he built AK to stop people going to BGT, that's why their room key was a credit card, that's why they delivered merchandise to their room so that they stayed on property spending. Although it was cutthroat it was genius. Times in Central Florida are changing and where many visitors prioritised Disney overall with limited time for Universal now that EPIC has opened there may well be a growing trend of visitors prioritising Universal for 4-5 full days and staying at Universal hotels or on I-Drive with an occasional visit to WDW. If this happens then Disney may have no choice but to build the fifth park as opening isolated attractions and small lands in a staggered manner may not be enough to reverse the trend. However, while attendances remain strong, and we don't yet know the impact of EPIC, then Robert's analysis makes perfect sense. Time will tell but don't rule it out because the "Ravenous Rat" doesn't like competition and only likes to be the undisputed #1...... and they do have a fantastic record of achieving it.

@Russell: The pros and cons about WDW opening a fifth gate is a widely discussed proposition on the internet.

Did you ever remember a similarity prevalent discussion about Comcast developing a waterpark before announcing VB?

The VB property could've been an IOA expansion (built at 2016/2017 prices) supplanting the need to build EU.

@TH - A lot of the discussion about VB was about Universal's decision to categorize the water park as Universal Orlando's 3rd theme park, not about Universal building an Epic-like theme park in its place. At the time, there was very little expectation that Universal was going to expand the footprint of their resort, certainly not all the way to the Lockheed Martin parcel. I would agree that Universal could have built an actual theme park like Epic where VB currently stands, though it would have been very small unless they didn't build Cabana Bay, Aventura, and Sapphire Falls, which were all needed to meet the overall growth of the resort as a whole. So, if they did put Epic at the original campus, they would have lost the appeal of thousands of rooms that could be marketed as "walkable" and part of the core resort. I don't think building VB instead of another actual theme park was a "bad" idea, because not only did it give Universal another tool to market the resort as a 3-5 day vacation (particularly after WWoHP had turned it from a 1-2 day visit into 3-4 days), but since a water park is much smaller than a theme park, building Epic at the core of the resort would have almost certainly resulted in losing Cabana Bay and probably other onsite resorts, which would have undermined Universal's attempt to extend guest stays.