Turbocharged: Disney Announces $3 Billion Increase in Capital Expenditures to $8 Billion Total in 2025

The Walt Disney Company has released its 2024 Annual Report, and with the new document come some new projections on Capital Expenditure investments at the company. While Disney executives have talked about “turbocharging” investments for a little while now, this new document may shed some insight into just how much money Disney is willing to spend moving forward. Let’s take a look!

Turbocharged!

It’s a phrase that we’ve heard repeated a few times by Disney executives: turbocharged investment in the theme parks. The idea of “turbocharging” investments can be traced back to a September 2023 announcement that Disney would be investing $60 billion into its theme park division over the next 10 years. The figure represented an increase in capital nearly double what Disney had been throwing at the theme parks, and it signaled that Disney was really trying to invest in a line of business that certainly had earned the capital.

In an email to the New York Times, Bob Iger uttered the first usage of the word “turbocharged” and a phrase was born.

There are far fewer limits to our parks business than people think.

The growth trajectory is very compelling if we do nothing beyond what we have already committed. By dramatically increasing our investment — building big, being ambitious, maintaining quality and high standards and using our most popular I.P. — it will be turbocharged.
Bob Iger, September 2023 email

Since then, Iger and Disney Experiences Chairman Josh D’Amaro have not been shy to utter the word “turbocharge” despite very little actual movement or shovels in the ground. That’s about to change in 2025 with a number of projects getting ready to kick off around the Walt Disney World theme parks and beyond.

$5.4 Billion Investment in 2024

With the newly filed Annual Report, we have a look into how much money Disney invested in its various lines of business, with Disney Experiences accounting for the largest spend within the company. In 2024, Disney invested $3.7 billion in the Experiences division, $977 million in Entertainment, $10 million in Sports, and $766 at Corporate. Combined, that added up to just over $5.4 billion in Capital Expenditures in 2024.

Disney had an additional line item of $1.47 billion for “cash used in other investing activities” for a grand total of $6.88 billion in 2024.

Even though the Capital Expenditures totaled almost $7 billion, it seems like the extra roughly $1.5 billion is an outlier that should be discarded. In fact, Disney even says that the baseline spend that they’re doing their 2025 forecasting off of is $5 billion, so we’ll use the same figure.

Drilling down into the Experiences division, the $3.7 billion that Disney spent in 2024 is up more than $600 million over 2023 CapEx spend. Disney says that the increase in spending is due to “higher spending on cruise ship fleet expansion, theme park and resort expansion and new attractions”. Not particularly insightful.

$8 Billion Investment in 2025

In the Annual Report, Disney forecasts that Capital Expenditure spend in 2025 will jump $3 billion from $5 billion in 2024 up to $8 billion in 2025. Notably, Disney says that the jump in spending will primarily be due to higher spending within the Experiences division.

The Company currently expects its fiscal 2025 capital expenditures to total approximately $8 billion compared to fiscal 2024 capital expenditures of $5 billion. The projected increase in capital expenditures is primarily due to higher spending at Experiences, attributable to continued investment in cruise ship fleet expansion and new guest offerings at our theme parks.
2024 Annual Report

It’s worth noting here that Disney always forecasts more spending than they actually end up doing. For 2024, Disney had forecasted $6 billion in spend and the actual figure was $5.4 billion. We’ve certainly seen higher deltas in years past, but they very rarely exceed forecasted spending. Even so, the $8 billion figure is, by far, the highest and most ambitious that we’ve seen in our coverage of the Company.

Where Is the Money Going?

It’s easy to get a bit jaded when reporting on CapEx forecasting, especially when Disney seems to have a very special spot for its cruise line business while the theme parks fall behind. That said, there are a number of projects on the horizon that should give theme park fans something to look forward to (disagreements about plan details notwithstanding).

Over at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, the first phase of the Tropical Americas project is now underway with the closure of a portion of DinoLand USA. More of DinoLand USA will close early next year as Disney targets a 2027 opening timeframe for the all-new land.

At Disney’s Hollywood Studios, the Muppets Courtyard area (including MuppetVision 3D) will have its final day of operation on June 7th and construction walls will block off the area the next day as Disney begins work on a Monsters Inc.-themed land.

At Magic Kingdom, change is on the horizon with the announced replacement of Tom Sawyer Island and the Rivers of America with a Cars-themed expansion to Frontierland. Disney has not announced a closure date for that section of the park, but it’s got to be sometime in the next year or so.

Villains land announcement at 2024 D23 Expo

Long story short, we’re starting to see the executive statements align with the SEC documents, and both of those are starting to align with theme park projects.

As we think about Capital Expenditures spending, it’s important to keep in mind that the Experiences division is not just theme parks. Cruise ships account for a significant portion of the spending. It’s also worth remembering that there are a number of theme parks worldwide that could account for the spending. Disney does break down the Capital Expenditures into “Domestic” and “International”, and domestic spending is somewhere around 3x of what international spending is.

Finally, there is another figure that executives have previously mentioned, but not in some time and that’s $17 billion of dedicated spend at Walt Disney World alone. Even at the most expensive estimates, what Disney has announced so far for the theme parks can’t be even half of that $17 billion figure. We can probably consider the current slate of projects as phase one of what Disney has planned for the next decade.

As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!

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