Disney World News: Characters Return, Hours Change, Iger & Chapek Pay Doubles
It’s time for another Walt Disney World news roundup! This one covers the latest changes to park hours & Extended Evening Hours, this weekend’s water park closure, more returning characters, executive compensation for the Bobs, and more.
As usual, we’ll start with the latest release of new and modified operating schedules. All four theme parks have had hours for another week added to DisneyWorld.com’s park hours, and the current calendar now runs through April 3, 2022. Here are the hours for most dates that are newly-added for Spring 2022:
- Magic Kingdom: 9 am to 9 pm
- Epcot: 10 am to 9 pm
- Hollywood Studios: 9 am to 9 pm
- Animal Kingdom: 9 am to 7 pm
- Disney Springs: 10 am to 11 pm (11:30 pm on Fridays & Saturdays)
In addition to these boilerplate hours for March and early April 2022, there are also extensions to park hours for several dates over the course of the next couple months. The most notable new change is that Epcot will open at 9 am on a handful of weekends in February. Magic Kingdom also has later weekend closings, but most of those aren’t new. Additionally, Magic Kingdom’s 8 pm closing from mid-February through March will probably be extended.
In other park hours news–or rather, lack thereof–Typhoon Lagoon water park will be closed again today (January 22, 2022) and tomorrow due to low temperatures.
It’s currently 52 degrees and rainy around Walt Disney World, which most Midwesterners would consider t-shirt and shorts weather…but not swimming season, I guess. Typhoon Lagoon has been closed several days since reopening earlier this month. That’s not uncommon for this time of year, but it does seem like there have been more cold days than normal.
Another change is happening with Extended Evening Hours, with Magic Kingdom offering the Deluxe/DVC resort perk on Tuesday, March 29 instead of the following Wednesday, pursuant to the normal pattern. Other days seeing a shift are February 21 and 23, but neither of those are new developments.
As a general matter, you’ll want to review your specific travel dates—ideally right before you visit—for actual current park hours. For the most part, the parks are sticking to their standard schedules for winter dates.
In positive news, more character meet & greetings (err…sightings) are returning to Epcot this weekend. In Future World at Journey into Imagination, Vanellope and Joy are back in the ImageWorks post-show area (which can also be accessed through the exit without riding). Donald Duck is back at the Mexico pavilion, appearing in the outdoor meet & greet location tucked away to the right of the pyramid. (The non-distanced photo above is an archive image.)
Like the other recently-returning sightings at Walt Disney World, these will offer individualized time indoors for selfies and posed photos, but will be physically-distanced–meaning no hugs or autographs. Additionally, these offerings will occur alongside pop-up cavalcades, motorcades, flotillas, and spontaneous sightings.
I’ll repeat my common refrain: any incremental step towards normalcy is progress—moving in the right direction is great to see, even if it doesn’t appeal to me. My only complaint about these character sightings is that all the ones we’ve done (so far) haven’t had PhotoPass photographers and the resulting photos have been bad. (The lighting at dedicated meet & greets really needs fill flash to be even.) We haven’t done these ones yet, but at least the Donald Duck one should be good.
Finally, the skyrocketing salaries of Disney CEO Bob Chapek and Executive Chairman Bob Iger, per Disney’s proxy filing with the SEC. Chapek’s compensation package for the company’s fiscal 2021 year was $32.5 million, more than double the $14.2 million he took home the previous year.
Chapek’s base salary for FY2021 was $2.5 million (up from $1.8 million in FY2020), with his compensation also including $10.2 million in stock awards, $3.75 million in stock options, and a $14.3 million cash bonus.
Iger’s total compensation package neared $46 million, as compared to $21 million the year prior. Again, more than double. He received $3 million in salary for FY2021, with his compensation also including a $22.9 million cash bonus, plus $9.5 million in Disney stock, and $9.3 million in stock options.
That total does not include stock Iger was contractually entitled to receive when his tenure with the Walt Disney Company concluded, with that being worth a total of $231 million as of October 1, 2021.
For fiscal year 2021, Disney posted revenue of $67.4 billion (up 3%) and net income of $2.0 billion, versus a net loss of $2.8 billion in FY2020. Perhaps most crucially to the company’s strategic goals, it reported 179 million streaming subscribers worldwide, including 118.1 million for the key Disney+ service.
You might recall that in fiscal 2020, no top Disney executives received performance-based bonuses and most had their salaries reduced (Iger declined his entirely) amid the economic fallout of the pandemic. If you’re curious as to Disney’s rationales for the compensation amounts, you can find those in Disney’s SEC filing. They’re more or less what you’d expect if you listen to earnings calls or read our recaps, though.
I don’t think you really need my commentary on this. Read the room, guys. This isn’t just poor optics, it’s also a reflection of the chasm between the company’s top “leaders” and frontline Cast Members and customers.
The latter two groups had another tough year. For guests, I probably don’t need to recap the laundry list of cuts, price increases, and ways the experience was diminished. When it comes to Cast Members, morale is still incredibly low, employees are overworked due to staffing shortages, and there are continued tensions between Cast Members and guests due to the decisions and policy choices of those aforementioned leaders. To be sure, things are better than the previous year, but hardly back to normal.
Beyond that, my analysis is unlikely to satisfy anyone. I feel like this is one of those loaded and polarizing topics, where anything short of “eat the rich” or “executives deserve every penny for their high stakes jobs” is bound to be unpopular. I don’t agree with either perspective, so now might be the time to close out this browser tab if you ardently do.
As with so many issues, executive compensation is more complicated and nuanced than that. I don’t think that multi-million dollar pay is categorically bad, but it should be predicated on real world results (not just stock price at a time when valuations were skyrocketing, speculative, and arguably divorced from fundamentals–see yesterday) and delivering unique success that few others could have accomplished.
In another likely unpopular take, I believe Chapek is almost certainly highly talented. Failing upwards is definitely a thing, but not to that extent. While I can’t say I’m a fan of what he has done to Parks & Resorts, he delivered real results in other roles.
His biggest problem is that he’s a terrible communicator, and lacks the charm and affability of Iger or Eisner. Those traits arguably don’t matter for the position of CEO generally, but they absolutely do matter for the Walt Disney Company’s CEO. It’s a very public-facing role, and just having a bit of charisma could go a long way.
From my perspective, the trouble with Chapek’s compensation last year is that it’s not based on anything tangible or special performance at a high level. When it comes to Parks & Resorts, he has essentially been a hatchet man thus far–that requires skill, but not CEO-caliber acumen and savvy. He has not built or grown the business in a meaningful, substantive way–improving per caps by raising prices and cutting costs doesn’t count.
When it comes to everything for which he’s praised on the DTC side of the business, it’s almost entirely speculative. For all of the talk about the success of Disney+, it’s important to remember that the streaming service is not profitable, and isn’t forecast to reach that point until FY2024 at the earliest. “Success” is measured in subscribers, market share, and stock price–and that last one is susceptible to the rising and falling fortunes of streaming’s outlook as a whole (again, see yesterday).
In my view, an example of an executive accomplishing unique success would be Bob Iger repairing the relationship with Pixar, completing that acquisition along with those of Marvel and Star Wars, and rebuilding the latter two into the powerhouses they are today. Those transactions took exceptional finesse to consummate, and Iger’s subsequent stewardship of those brands and their output was likewise deftly managed. That was all high-risk, high-reward.
The case could be made that whatever success Disney+ enjoys going forward is due to the strength of that intellectual property, along with the infrastructure and tech deals Iger made to build the DTC platforms, and the successful launch of Disney+ while Iger was at the helm. This isn’t to say the streaming service is on autopilot, just that the fruits of Iger’s positioning Disney as a media company will be enjoyed for decades to come. If anyone is deserving of “excessive” compensation, it’s Bob Iger. His exit stock wouldn’t have been worth $231 million but for the decisions and risks Iger took.
With all of that said, there is something unsettling about these levels of compensation, in general. CEO pay is now exponentially higher than that of the average worker, with that gap exploding in recent decades. I’m a firm believer in the American dream, free markets, etc., but there are ways this feels like a perversion of all that.
Outside of founders, it’s hard to say that any executive is an unparalleled visionary who is irreplaceable. Few people at the top of corporate America are once-in-a-generation talents. Upper echelon, sure. They are immensely skilled and trained, but there are still thousands of other individuals who could occupy those positions and likely enjoy similar success. No company has Tom Brady or Serena Williams as its CEO.
To summarize, my perspective is that no executive at the Walt Disney Company should have received current-year compensation last year over $20 million for a couple of reasons. The first is optics, as the family-friendly company’s customers and employees were still struggling and various business units were making cutbacks and operating as if they were in survival mode. You don’t repeatedly hammer on the challenges and slow road to recovery while paying leaders as if the company is enjoying unprecedented success. That’s a bad look.
It’s also not a look that accurately reflects reality. Multiple business units at Disney are still struggling, including theme parks. Whatever successes Disney+ is enjoying, they’re not yet financial. It would be one thing if Disney’s recovery were occurring at an unprecedented pace, the company had navigated around the supply chain or labor woes facing so many other businesses, or Chapek was outmaneuvering competitors in positioning for the future. That might qualify as unique success that deserves to be compensated accordingly. From the outside, none of that appears to be the case.
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YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you think about all this Walt Disney World news? Excited for anything that’s returning to the parks this month? Thoughts on the FY2021 compensation of the Bobs? Do you agree or disagree with our commentary? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
OK Everyone is fired!!!!!!!! If you Rev $67Bil. and you net $2Bil. your fired! And lets be clear here that the millions that is given to these positions is pennies when you look at the Revenue that comes in. The problem to level this playing field is these are the numbers that was “reported”. And now we can talk about the salaries that are way below making any kind of since. True numbers compared to below McDonald wages is a true embarrassment! This would explain the look on the faces of the employees and the mundane posture they hold all day as if they wish they were somewhere else.
Agree that this would be a much easier pill to swallow if Chapek had even one ounce of charm. Instead he comes off as plastic, phony, and completely detached from the theme park segment.
I’m going to be honest looking at these salaries and comp packages makes me sick. How many staff were out of work. What was their compensation package.. what happened to the people who ACTUALLY WORK FOR THEIR MONEY?????
I just booked a disney vacation but I’m now really pissed off. They took away magical express, magic bands, and have to pay for fast pass and magic bands??? Total BA these idiots make gazzilons of dollars doing what?? As a nurse part of the pandemic I find this offensive and I’m not easily offended. Do they give discounts for nurses EMTs etc? Nope, but these big wigs making a fortune for NOTHING. No real contribution to the betterment of society. Totally disgusted. After this trip Disney can kiss my ass until they offer frontline workers more, give their staff more, all those perks for useless upper crust people go away. Poor Walt rolling over in his grave…
They need to bring Iger’s back and get rid of the person that’s running Disney into the ground.
Unrelated to the exec conversation, which for the record- makes me ill, considering the conditions in which the cast members have found themselves in throughout the pandemic. Not to mention, we are heading there for spring break this year, our first since the pandemic started. We’ve put it off for over 2 years and I’m so disheartened with a trip costing well over $10,000 (for what we used to to for less) and we are giving up perks left and right. Anyway, my question is related to this change in EMH being changed for the 1 night. I don’t understand the logic there. They are doing Epcot and now MK back to back nights, which is hard. We were planning to enjoy Epcot EMH on a Monday, take a break on Tuesday and then do EMH on Wednesday. We are early risers and like to rope drop but that’s so much harder when you stay until 11 the night before. Any idea why they would change this for just the 1 week?
Ugh, those numbers are disgusting. Especially after the ridiculous price increases and decreases in quantity AND quality that were recently announced. This country is so backwards in priorities. As others have said, neither of those individuals are entirely unique. I’d wager there are more than thousands who could do their job equally, possibly even better. But as you mentioned, the gap between the top making tens of millions and the ones at the bottom *actually* doing the work barely making a living is astonishing.
It really feels like I am swimming upstream right now when it comes to keeping goodwill toward Disney. I WANT to go “home” and continue taking my family there, but every time I begin looking at blogs and sites to start planning I end up with such a bad taste in my mouth (all the things that are missing, the selling out of “magic moments” for corporate profit, the clear efforts to take a nickel and a dime for services that used to be what made Disney THE industry gold standard for customer service) I cannot justify the cost for the experience. At this point, what is making a trip to Disney better than a trip to Universal? Or Dollywood? Or ANY other theme park I haven’t been to? We’ve missed those because we couldn’t tear away from the Disney experience, but I guess we’ll be checking them out soon.
Very well written piece. Easy to get the pitchforks out without adding any nuance with news like this.
The only one who potentially deserved a large sum of money as CEO was Eisner for saving the company. There was a risk there that he wouldn’t make anything and the company would go under so I sort of understood his argument for stock options. He did also have that heart attack from the stress.
I have no concrete proof that Chapek is doing anything of great value. He’s cutting costs and rising prices, sure. He will potentially make money off of streaming? I don’t see any astounding “saving the company” moves. I don’t really see much leadership other than him throwing around buzz words like “pillars” and “metaverse”. Dude is just counting on continued infinite market growth. Which…meh. We won’t really see the end results of his choices for years.
I feel a bit like a sucker reading this. We have a Disney trip coming up and I keep telling myself it will be great despite higher prices, smaller portions, less character interaction, less mousekeeping, overall less magic. I’m not naive enough to think the execs make reasonable salaries, but for them to have had a banner year with all this degradation going on is just sickening.
We seem to value our entertainment more than our lives. I think executives of theme parks as a whole are way overpaid. I think the President of the United States and people who save lives are worth a lot more than anyone in the entertainment industry. The President because he is responsible for an entire nation, and peo[ple who save lives because without your life you cease to exist and cannot be entertained by anyone or anything. Pay the Doctors, healthcare workers, firefighters, police, and military more and the entertainers less. We need to get our priorities straight!
Employees in the office had been asked to take pay cuts….guess to make the top 2 fatter wallets. Also took away stock dividends for all invested in Disney. They don’t care of anyone but themselves.
(Also, just a side note, but reading Disney War definitely didn’t improve my feelings about executives, including Disney executives, or the need for the market to give them high pay levels. They’re a bunch of petty children doing power plays constantly. Yuck.)
Sorry, but nobody deserves millions, much less tens of millions. He’s not any more of a genius than a scientist working for relatively low pay, or any more important than a surgeon saving lives on a daily basis. We don’t value things appropriately. Yes, free market. But if that’s the result of the free market, then it’s pretty absurd that we idealize it so much. There’s a reason young people don’t see that term positively any more, and this is a perfect example.
Putting economics/politics aside, just from a Disney fan perspective, increasing prices, reducing quality, and skyrocketing CEO pay is simply disgusting. If we as fans wanted to see success rewarded, it would look very different to what we’ve been witnessing lately. Stuff like this continues to damage faith in a company we want to continue to love.
(The only thing that makes me feel better is that it’s in his contract, and hard to take back without drama and court cases, but these executives shouldn’t have been offered stuff like this in the first place. The incentive structure needs to be different.)
Agree with the overall commentary on compensation – executive pay has gotten out of hand and it’s not just Disney (which is why it persists: “everyone else is doing it”) Take a look at the CEO’s who get multimillions and fail. I think you could replace Chapek with any of 100 people that would take 1/10th or even 1/100th his salary and they would still do just as well.
Spot on.
My “favorite” example is Discovery’s CEO (whose name I can’t even remember–that’s how significant he is) who is often in the top 5 for total compensation. There’s only one person at Discovery who deserves to make $40+ million per year, and that’s the inventor of Shark Week! 😉
Well, now we know the reasoning and the timing for that company-wide letter that was sent out by Chapek and publicized everywhere. Unfortunately, that just makes this seem kind of worse? Not because I’m against leaders getting paid what they’re worth, but because that money could clearly go to other more deserving areas at the moment. You’re right–the company can’t be saying ‘we need to raise money on all food in the parks because of supply chain issues’ and then pay that much to their CEOs. It makes it feel like the raised prices went straight into the exec’s wallets, regardless of how it actually works.
Okay now a different topic–when was that pic of you and Donald taken? Because that seems a lot more contact-y than other current meet-and-greets.
“Okay now a different topic—when was that pic of you and Donald taken? Because that seems a lot more contact-y than other current meet-and-greets.”
Oh yikes–I didn’t mean to imply that! It’s an old photo.
We don’t have a single photo from the current sightings at Walt Disney World that have been “approved for publication” on the blog by all parties involved. 😉 (Like I said, the lighting is really bad.)
Really enjoy your analysis here, Tom. Those compensation figures are staggering(!),
especially in the context of recent events. Compensation is a very tricky thing in every tier of income, but arguably even more so at the top because of the corporate politics in play (and, you know, greed). The admirable thing for Chapek to do is decline or restructure that windfall, but that could create a lot of enemies on the board and in the c-suite if he were to imply that everyone should do the same. It would take a great leader to convince those executives to do that, and I think we already know Chapek doesn’t possess that kind of leadership. He’s too quantitative with seemingly very little qualitative, and a move like that would require the inverse.
Hm. From what your saying it seems if you wanted to express your dissatisfaction with chapek, a mass drop Disney + would possibly gain more attention than indicating you won’t go to park in future.
It seems right now other people may still be lining up to take your hotel room or dining reservation. But mass dropping of Disney+ might be more attention grabbing because it’s such a focused on metric.
Just wondering out loud.
My assessment is definitely reductionist and focuses only on two segments of a massive conglomerate, but to your point, Chapek’s fortunes rise and fall with Disney+ and the rest of the DTC business. Wall Street cares about theme parks, but they’re viewed as a mature business–investors are absolutely obsessed with streaming.
You forgot to mention the Fox asset acquisitions as executive accomplishment and streaming catalog contribution. The volume of Fox content on Disney+ is significant, but even that pales in importance to to Fox acquisitions giving Disney a controlling stake in Hulu. That removed a potential streaming competitor AND turned it into a streaming asset for the company. I’d say the long term impact of that may dwarf the Pixar and Lucas deals. I think Disney has made more hay from the Marvel deal, though.
“I’d say the long term impact of that may dwarf the Pixar and Lucas deals.”
May is the operative word in that sentence. I think everything you wrote is probably going to be true, but the success of the Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel deals is already well-established and clear-cut.
ick. those numbers are just gross.