Bob Iger on the Health and Future of the Disney Store

I promised highlights from the Fourth Quarter Earnings Call that happened yesterday, but truth be told nothing new came out of it.

What I found most interesting was CEO Bob Iger's take on the Disney Store:

Well we're pretty excited about the new design. We just opened the new store which you should see in Times Square, but we'll proceed with real caution. We're using the design as a platform to greatly improve the quality of the merchandise and the presentation and we're also using it to improve location which we've done quite well. Times Square, I think, is a good example of that. But we look at specialty retail as a relatively challenging business and with that in mind we're going to be really careful and watch these results quite carefully. We've redesigned in the 18-19 store range, I think maybe it was around 20, and we don't see going significantly higher fast. We're going to wait and see how these stores do before we make any decisions about rollout. It cost us slightly above a million dollars a store for this new design. We think it's closer to probably $1.4 for the initial stores, and that will trend down as we bring this design to more, but we're going to be careful about this.

Emphasis added.

The Disney Store was hugely successful when introduced but was completely decimated by over-expansion. The truth is, there's no need for a Disney Store in every mall in America.

Iger has talked about modeling the segment after the Apple Stores. There's a lot of Apple Stores, but they aren't over exposed. The location for each one is carefully selected and the stores are individually designed. They work equally well as brand showcases and retail outlets.

It will be interesting to see how they proceed.

Disney Character Voices International

Terrific interview with French Creative Director Boualem Lamhene.

The division is charged with creating parity between the voice acting for Disney characters worldwide.

Disney Profits Down 7% in Fourth Quarter

Dramatic gains at Walt Disney Studios hampered by poor theme park and media network performance.

Highlights from the earnings call coming later tonight or tomorrow.

Sally Corporation Factory Tour

Theme Park Review member moinab recently toured the Jacksonville, FL headquarters of Sally Corporation and was able to document her experience.

Sally Corp designs and constructs dark rides, including animatronic figures, for various theme park companies including Legoland, Six Flags and many regional amusement parks.

I always like seeing the behind-the-scenes aspect of attraction creation.

First Trailer for New Winnie the Pooh Film

I've never really sparked to Winnie the Pooh, so I'll probably sit this one out.

D23 Armchair Archivist

The first episode of D23's new video series Armchair Archivist.

It's nice, but the highlight is definitely seeing the last footage Walt shot before his death.

Losses Narrow at Disneyland Paris

Improved guest spending offset lower attendance and hotel occupancy.

The Independent:

The company booked a net loss of €45.2m for the 12 months to the end of September, compared to €63m a year ago.

Disneyland Paris visitor numbers, on the other hand, stood at 15 million, down from 15.4 million in 2009. Visitors spent more, however, with the average guest doling out €45.3 this year, up from €44.22 in 2009.

Demolition of the Sunshine Plaza Begins

You can clearly see the It's Tough To Be A Bug show building now with all the missing trees.

Private Tour of Walt's Disneyland Apartment

MiceChat user CMHusband recently had the opportunity to tour Walt's famed Disneyland apartment located above the fire station on Main Street.

Lots of great pictures taken inside the exclusive location.

Jon Favreau Interested in Disney's Magic Kingdom Film

Didn't know they were planning of moving ahead with this so quickly. It also sounds like he's planning on directing Iron Man 3 as well.

Deadline.com:

Jon Favreau is in talks to direct Magic Kingdom, the Disney film with the premise that the attractions at the venerable theme park come to life. The studio set the project up nearly two years ago and got a draft by Battlestar Galactica's Ron Moore, but a new writer will be set and work on a new draft under Favreau.

As the article mentions, Disney has picked up a lot of A-list directors in the past few months. Kind of a change of strategy under Rich Ross.

Disney Developing Film Based on Enchanted Tiki Room, Hubris

The A.V. Club:

As the LAT acknowledges, “there’s not much known mythology behind the Tiki Room,” but such things don't matter when it comes to corporate synergy, as Zappa’s script isn’t so much a straight adaptation of the attraction, but rather “an action-adventure that mixes in Polynesian mythology.”

Perhaps it will disappear into the labyrinths of development hell, as Jungle Cruise did.

Al Lutz: Pyro & Parades? Pay Up!

To be read with extreme prejudice.

I don't know if they'll move forward with a hard ticket Christmas party to mirror the success at Halloween. It's true that a rough proposal has been drawn up, but it hasn't moved any further than that.

However, unlike others (mostly Annual Passholders) with an unfounded sense of entitlement, I'm not opposed to it.

Can anyone deny Halloween Time was significantly more manageable this year?

New Disney Store Opens in Times Square

The Associated Press (via the Washington Post):

The Times Square store, two years in the making, is expected to produce 5 percent of the chain's North American revenue. Disney's first Manhattan store opened in 1997 on Fifth Avenue and closed in January.

The new store debuted informally on Thursday and was to be open from 9 a.m. to midnight daily. But managers are testing a 1 a.m. store closing to accommodate the crowds showing up.

5% of the chain's North American revenue is an impressive figure.

They plan to refurbish the remaining stores over the next 5-7 years.

First Reviews of Tangled

The first reviews of Tangled are beginning to appear. Early critics are mixed.

Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter writes:

It would have been nice if Disney's self-touted 50th animated feature were one of its best, a film that could stand with the studio's classics, but the world will have to make do with "Tangled," a passably entertaining hodgepodge of old and new animation techniques, mixed sensibilities and hedged commercial calculations.

And Justin Change for Variety (subscription required) agrees, saying:

After last year's "The Princess and the Frog" grossed an underwhelming $104 million domestically, Disney execs opted to change the title of the new film from "Rapunzel" to the more gender-neutral "Tangled." If that suggests a vote of no confidence in traditional princess fare (imagine if "The Little Mermaid" had been called "Beached"), the hipper moniker does underscore the film's odd, somewhat perplexing mix of sensibilities -- pitched somewhere between Disney classicism and the self-conscious storybook quality of DreamWorks' "Shrek" movies or, at best, Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods."

Even more biased, self-proclaimed Disney fans, like those writing for The Disney Blog, conclude:

...while Tangled is not perfect, it is definitely entertaining and proof that Disney Animation is slowly returning to the right track creatively.

Color me less than enthused.

If tracking remains soft and Tangled underperforms, matching The Princess and the Frog's grosses or worse yet grossing less than that film's disappointing figures, where does Disney go from there?

Photos of the Disney Dream

A gallery of photos from USA Today of the almost finished ship.

The Disney Dream makes its maiden voyage 26 January 2011 out of Port Canaveral, FL.

It looks incredible.

ABC Wins Terrible Sounding 'Man Up', Possibly Starring Tim Allen

Deadline.com:

Word is new ABC programming chief Paul Lee was personally involved in the network's efforts to get the comedy that would bring Allen back to ABC where he toplined one of the network's biggest comedies, Home Improvement. Man Up, from 20th TV and studio-based 21 Laps/Adelstein, is a multi-camera family comedy about a guy fighting for his manhood in a world of women.

A sitcom based on misogyny. No doubt it'll be a big hit.

WSJ: Disney's Iger Uses Downturn as Investment Springboard

The Wall Street Journal interviews Disney CEO Bob Iger about the Company's investments during the recession.

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.