Disney is laying off 1,000 employees as part of its ongoing reorganization. The most severe impact is on the marketing, awards, and publicity departments of film, streaming, television, and cable; this isn’t affecting parks’ operations or live entertainment.
Disney’s moat is the theme parks and live entertainment, and while this reorganization was part of the previous plan, two recent developments have underscored the strategy. First, Disney lost its Sora/OpenAI partnership ($1B investment killed before closing when OpenAI shut Sora Down). Then, Epic Games, the company Disney invested $1.5 billion in back in 2024 to build a persistent entertainment universe, laid off 20% of its workforce, blaming a slump in players for the usually fantastically popular Fortnite.
Experiences, meanwhile, posted $10 billion in quarterly revenue, up 6%, and that’s where roughly 80% of the workforce sits.
The Disney flywheel is inverting. The old model started with the movie and then spread through merchandising and into the parks. Increasingly, Disney is running through physical experiences, and the media side looks more like it serves the parks than the other way around.
Good stories right now are being created in the real world, and the moment you can go through an entire universe on your phone, the ability to do it in real life becomes more special.
There’s also a competition problem that makes this shift feel inevitable. The tools have made it so anyone can tell a story and reach an audience — vertical video, fan fiction, anime, and AI-assisted dramas that are booming in China right now. Disney has more competition for storytelling than at any point in its history. What it doesn’t have competition for is building physical worlds that bring people together.
Meow Wolf made a similar move this week. After a year-long CEO search, the company chose Matthew Henick, a media, technology, and digital content executive with no background in physical attractions or location-based entertainment. He comes from Meta and gaming. “My job is to make sure millions more people get to feel that, whether they walk through our portals or encounter Meow Wolf in entirely new ways,” Henick said in the press release. Meow Wolf is preparing to open its Los Angeles exhibition late this year and a New York City location in late 2027. The logic is the same as Disney’s — start with the physical experience that creates the emotional connection, then figure out how to push it out across platforms.
Europa-Park seems to understand this well, and they’re partnering with Sally Özcan, Germany’s most successful food creator (2.2M+ on YouTube, 4M+ followers, 20M monthly views), to open her first physical café inside the park, marking what appears to be the first creator-operated restaurant at a major European theme park. Sally’s Café, located in the Blue Fire Dome in the Iceland-themed area, serves original creations from Özcan’s repertoire, along with cakes and specialty coffees.
The park is also expanding its original IP programming. SNORRI 4D, titled “Catch Me If You Candy,” is a new animated film from MACK Magic that brings the mascot of the Rulantica water world to the park’s 4D Magic Cinema for the first time. The daily show features vibrating seats, wind effects, and surround sound. The film extends the Rulantica brand, which until now has been confined to the adjacent water park, into park-side entertainment.
By partnering with video-savvy creators and extending the park’s IP through original films, Europa-Park shows it understands that physical experiences can act as a moat and that those experiences can extend into media, much like Disney.
Physical spaces that bring people together are the competitive advantage right now.
Digital should serve that core, not replace it. If your venue has something people can’t get from a screen, that’s the thing worth investing in.
