When Disney announced plans for the $850 million park a year ago, it was counting on the nation’s unconditional love. “I expected to be taken around on people’s shoulders,” CEO Michael Eisner complained to The Washington Post in June. The plan did rai se cheers from politicians, developers and citizens who saw a bonanza of jobs and revenue. The state approved $163 million in incentives, and regulators gave Disney a big nod just two weeks ago.
But Disney was vilified by historians, cartoonists and others determined to keep some vestige of American culture from going pop. The lineup included filmmaker Ken Burns and historian Stephen Ambrose. Environmentalists projected traffic jams, pollution and a cancer of strip malls. While this stripe of opponents is normally outgunned by well-heeled corporations, this time they were backed by wealthy landowners defending their quiet countryside. Anticipating long legal battles, Disney worried about keeping to a profitable schedule. “The time certainty was lost,” said an executive last week. And the role of hard-nosed spoiler was eroding Disney’s warm-and-fuzzy image.
Disney may well reincarnate the project. But it’s likely to run into similar roadblocks. The park’s economics demand that it be set near Washington to draw day-trippers, says Disney, but the closer it is to the city, the more problems of congestion will arise. Urban-area land costs are high. Last time Disney kept prices low by buying up options secretly; next time it would probably forgo secrecy to build support.
The fate of Disney’s America is only one tough choice for executives struggling to redefine the theme-park business. Attracting new customers is getting tougher, as the park’s customers age and competitors gain strength. With the number of visitors to the parks flat, pretax earnings fell by 5 percent for the first three quarters of fiscal 1994. And Disney has built a record of false starts; in recent years it has backed off plans for a waterside park and an international theme park, both in southern California. (The only new park now slated for the area is a competitor’s, Lego-Land.) Most troublesome is the now notorious Euro Disney. Fewer customers have come to the park in 1994 than in 1993, despite lower prices and a healthier economy.
In the end, Disney won’t rise or fall over one little park where Dumbo dons a stovepipe, But the capitulation in Virginia is a blow to Eisner’s personal game plan. Having built Disney into a marketing superpower, he now wants to burnish his record with something more highbrow. He proudly engaged top-flight architects to build the lavish-and half-empty–hotels at Euro Disney. He touted Disney’s America as an adjunct to the Smithsonian. Now he’s launching the Disney Institute, an Orlando study center that insiders have dubbed Chautauqua South, after the New York state center that sent cultural missionaries to the frontier in the 1800s. But making Mickey into a missionary for the 21st century is proving harder than Eisner anticipated. The mantle of cultural ma-yen is still out of reach.
