If you follow Disney news it's light on interesting developments, but I did like this:
WSJ: You're spending $1 billion to overhaul Disney California Adventure, Disneyland's less-famous neighbor. Why?
Mr. Iger: [Apple CEO] Steve Jobs is fond of talking about brand deposits and brand withdrawals. Any time you do something mediocre with your brand, that's a withdrawal. California Adventure was a brand withdrawal.
We debated, "Should we make it one park?" Raise the price at Disneyland, and suddenly one ticket buys you the whole thing. I even had Imagineers design that.
[But] we would have had to put in transportation systems. It would have cost us so much money to put the monorail in. And to do other things to create one park. That didn't make sense.
We all concluded that the only way we would improve returns on that park is if we made it better and we made it bigger. And we decided to put what is now [around] $1 billion into that.
WSJ: What are you adding?
Mr. Iger: We opened up the first attraction, [the animation-inspired] "World of Color." "Little Mermaid" [is] next summer, and then the big kahuna of them all, "Cars Land," which is a 12-acre land [based on the Pixar animated film.]
[Cars Land] will open in the middle of 2012. "World of Color" has increased attendance since it opened at California Adventure by 20%.Emphasis mine.
That's a pretty impressive return.