The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And interestingly enough, if you look at the increase of the core ticket, let’s say, Disneyland, it has not really increased that much, maybe slightly ahead of inflation over the last few years. But one of the things that was interesting to me and coming in and examining our pricing is, we are making that available to people for only 15 days a year. So, if you look at our new pricing strategy, we made it available, I think was 50 days a year, so we greatly increased accessibility to our lowest price. And it is really well received. So, we are going to manage capacity very, very carefully. Some of that, by the way, has enabled us to essentially shift mix to €“ from annual pass holders to people who may come just once in a lifetime or once.

They tend to be good customers of ours because of their per cap spending when they are there. That’s really helpful. Some of the things that we put in place to manage basically annual pass holders was done to help us manage capacity without having doing too much damage to the bottom line. Lastly, we have learned that when we invest in increasing capacity, the Star Wars lands would be a good example of that, Pandora was a great example of that. We can grow our business. In fact, if you look at the results when we put Pandora and Animal Kingdom from year-to-year, they were stunning in terms of how many more people visited Animal Kingdom. I mentioned on the call that we are going to bring a version of Avatar to Disneyland. We have other opportunities as well.

I have talked to Josh D’Amaro about this very recently, like this morning, again, to really look at all the great franchises of the company and see where we can invest in them in the parks to increase capacity while preserving guest satisfaction.

Doug Mitchelson: Thank you.

Alexia Quadrani: Operator, I think we have time for one more question.

Operator: Thank you. And our final question comes from Steven Cahall with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Steven Cahall: Thanks. Bob, I will ask you a question that we have asked Christine a lot over the last year, which is you made the comment about ESPN+ expressing some success in streaming and sports. And there is probably now about 40 million homes who have decided to not be in the bundle. So, what do you need to see out there in the linear world to decide that an ESPN ala carte sports service in streaming should be the big leap for Disney? And then just a small one, you mentioned about how a lot of content can amortize in places other than streaming. You had talked a lot today about cost cutting. Should we think about licensing as also being a potential sort of big profit pool over the next few years? Thank you.

Bob Iger: I will take the second part first, Steve. Yes. The answer to the second part is yes. Now, when you say big, I don’t know yet. I mean we are not really there. But when we bought Fox we greatly enhanced our television production and film production capabilities, bringing into the company great talent in both the movie and the TV side. As I have talked about getting more aggressive at curating general entertainment. By the way, we are not getting out of that business, but we are going to curate it more. We have opportunities using the great talent that we have to create for third-parties, and we are going to look at that very seriously. I actually think there is a nice opportunity to create a growth business for the company, but it’s way too soon to predict what that can be.