In this episode, Nick Sciple and Motley Fool contributor Rick Munarriz take a deep dive into Disney (DIS 0.35%). They provide a breakdown of various Disney businesses and how the shutdown has impacted them around the world. Learn what steps Disney has taken so far, what the company is doing to tackle the present situation, and what the future looks like. Also, Rick Munarriz shares a pro tip for future visitors to the theme parks and much more.
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This video was recorded on March 18, 2020.
Nick Sciple: Welcome to Industry Focus. I'm Nick Sciple. Today we'll be looking at Disney, which has been buffeted in recent weeks by park closures, cancellation of sporting events, and delays for its films. Joining me today to break it all down is Motley Fool contributor Rick Munarriz. Rick, how's it going?
Rick Munarriz: How are you doing, Nick? I'm doing a lot better than some of Disney's businesses right now, but I'm here, and hopefully Disney will still be, so yes.
Sciple: Yeah, it's been a while, a month. So I pulled the numbers right before we sat down and started recording. Down 39% in the past month, it was down 10% today last I checked. I know, Rick, you've been following Disney for a really long time. Have you seen anything like this in the stock ever before?
Munarriz: Yeah. Definitely not. And I've owned Disney basically since 1986, so since I was in college. So basically, I've held it through the market crash, through the recession in the '90s, obviously, through 9/11 and what that created with the theme parks and just general industry. This is definitely unheard of. Its theme parks have never been closed as long as they are right now. We've never had a complete sports outage like we're seeing now. And movie theaters are closed now. So there are a lot of aspects of Disney's business getting hit in ways that's never happened at Disney before.
Sciple: Yeah, absolutely. You look at the parks, this is a significant chunk of revenue, almost half of operating income. You've written about this, that Monday was the first time ever that all the Disney and Universal Studios parks nationwide were closed on the same day. When we're looking at this park closure, how should we be thinking about that as investors, the impact on the company?
Munarriz: Yeah, it's a definite impact, obviously. I mean, the parks are closed. And while they've had parks closed from time to time, when the hurricanes hit Florida, they closed; obviously, there was a 9/11-related closure when both parks in California and in Florida closed down for a while. But outside of, let's say, the tsunami in Japan a few years ago, that closed that park out for about a month, we've never seen this kind of prolonged outage. And Disney has never been as large as it is now, with the theme parks, obviously, now in Hong Kong and Shanghai and Paris and Tokyo and the U.S., of course, all closed.
So we really don't know the kind of impact we have here. We know what Disney thinks its impact was in China with Shanghai and Hong Kong. Back in their earnings call, back in early February, which seems like a lifetime ago, they said it was going to be a $175 million hit. So we know that that's for those two parks in Hong Kong and Shanghai, that they own a minority stake in, a some-40% stake, but it is significant.
But now, we have Tokyo closed in March. And Tokyo Disneyland, while Disney doesn't own, they do collect some pretty hefty royalties and licensing fees from that park, from the resort, so that's gone. And now we have, of course, the U.S., where, I mean, this is clearly going to be a ten-figure kind of hit on domestic parks. When you think about the some-20 resorts that Disney has at Disney World. There are three hotels in Disneyland, but just the fact that they own them fully, it's 100% of the hit. And not just that, the fact that they are refunding people their annual passes, tickets that have to be extended.
And we don't know, when this is over, when the parks are open again, if people are just going to say, "Oh, great, I can go back to Disneyland, I can go back to Disney World." There's going to be the instinct to do that. But we don't know what the state of the economy will be at that point, if people could even afford a Disney World or a Disneyland vacation. Those things aren't cheap. So there's a lot of factors right now, and even in the near future, which are concerning, at least on the theme park end.
Sciple: Yeah, absolutely. And this is revenue we talk about with restaurants a lot, here on the various Motley Fool podcasts, this is revenue that doesn't come back. I mean, you lose these days in the parks, these days when people will be eating, that sort of thing. It's to be determined how long this is going to last. They did send home all their Disney College Program participants, which suggests this is going to be an extended, prolonged outage. It's just hard to know.
Moving on to the media network side of the business, you mentioned earlier, sports being closed down. Where does this leave ESPN right now? I mean, they cover the sports genre.
Munarriz: Yeah, ESPN is obviously -- I mean, they're not as important to Disney as they were maybe a couple years ago, when it was like the driver now. Obviously, we live in the cord-cutting revolution, the cord-cutters are getting rid of ESPN. We've seen ESPN subscribers decline the last few years. But specifically, to ESPN, yes, all major sporting events are for, all effective purposes, canceled. And this is pretty much worldwide, it's not as if there's, like, one league out there that's open. So that's obviously a big deal to ESPN.
But on the other hand, sports news is still happening. And it's not a matter of, well, Kevin Durant has coronavirus and that's headlines, you know, right now as we're recording this episode, headline of the day before, but you do have a case where we have the NFL free agency going on and Tom Brady leaving New England after two decades of dominance there, is a pretty big deal. So people are tuning to ESPN, and they're getting their SportsCenter fix.
And the only silver lining in this, for Disney's sake, is that ESPN, their sports programming, their news programming is actually the cost-effective part of that business, because they're paying a lot of money for pro sports leagues, which will be pretty much on ice right now -- no hockey pun intended -- as these leads are now playing the game.
So I think you're going to see a case where it's going to be a net negative. Of course, I mean, nobody likes to see sports basically hit the pause button for weeks, if not months at this point. But at the end of the day as the bottom line, it may not be as big of an impact as we see in Disney's theme parks for that matter or even its studio division, which is going to take a lot more hurt than just the fact that sports is off right now for a little bit.
Sciple: Yeah, it is interesting, ESPN leadership came out -- I believe it was yesterday maybe -- to say that they're going to continue doing that kind of news coverage you mentioned, SportsCenter, as well as they're going to be looking to air archival content and themed stunt event programming -- which, the first thing I thought about was dodgeball, ESPN 8, The Ocho, if they start running that sort of thing, Rick, what would you be most excited to watch on ESPN?
Munarriz: I would love to see retired basketball players doing dodgeball. I'd love to see Barkley and Shaq go at it, but. No, I mean, anything, you know, people are going to be starved for entertainment that if it's just basically LeBron James and Dwyane Wade playing a game of poker together, that's going to be entertainment. So yeah, I think people are going to be hungry for anything that happens, anything we get out of this, but if it's, like, ESPN Classic, which is an established ESPN channel showing archival footage, we know its appeal is limited, there's only so many times you want to see Doug Flutie do the Hail Mary pass against UM when he was in Boston College many years ago.
So there's a lifespan. Sports is meant to be experienced live, people can relive the Super Bowl and the championships, but its old footage is great in documentary form but it's not the kind of stuff that's going to generate advertising revenue, the kind that they're going to have to forego now.
Sciple: Yeah, unfortunately, they said that their Michael Jordan documentary they've been working on, isn't ready to roll out, which would be a great thing to roll out right now.
Moving on to the studios, this is another -- I mean, really, across the board, basically every business that Disney is in is getting hit, but the studio division has delayed some production, delayed some releases of movies. How should we be thinking about that?
Munarriz: Yeah, I mean, this is another part, because Disney is an ecosystem, and we know that once they put out a hit movie, it winds up in its theme parks, it winds up later on in Disney+ and through the Disney Channel. Its one hit, basically, just trickles down through the rest of the family. If they have a hit ride, even at Disney World, like, Pirates of the Caribbean or Haunted Mansion or now Jungle Cruise -- which is one of these movies that was supposed to be coming out soon -- you do have a case where even that can basically get the ecosystem rolling with movies and merchandise and consumer products and all that. You do have a case where theaters are now, for all effective purposes, closed. And Disney's last movie, which came out earlier this month, was Onward from Pixar and it had $39.1 million in its opening weekend, which is the worst Pixar opening in more than 10 years.
So obviously, you tell yourself, well, people didn't want to be at the movie theaters, and this is an original property, not a sequel, people didn't know these characters or invest in these franchises the way they are in some of Disney's earlier IP, but now you have the case that Mulan, which is not the animated that came out some-20 years ago but the actual live-action remake, which was getting pretty good reviews, was supposed to come out later this month, it's gone, Disney hasn't said when it's going to happen. Black Widow and all the studios have also followed suit. So it's definitely going to be a void.
When the multiplex opens again, what they're going to be showing -- because all these studios are pretty much backed off until people are coming back into theaters, and this, obviously, affects Disney. And just production of new movies, production of new TV shows is also on ice. As these companies are saying, "Well, we can't have people just getting together and film stuff, for social distancing." So there's a content gap, the kind that we see during a writers' strike, but this is more far-reaching because it is a case where nothing is being done, period.
Sciple: Right. And the one thing I think about, Rick, specifically, as Marvel, you see this delaying of Black Widow. This is a story that Disney has been telling, gosh, I mean, before I was even in high school maybe, and so when you pull this Black Widow movie out of the queue, how does that affect these other movies in the cinematic universe? Are we going to see all these delays get kicked back, or how should that play out?
Munarriz: And again, this all depends on how -- I mean, the reason we're not getting dates on some of these movies is because we don't know when the coast is going to be clear. If things are fine, like, in China, we're already starting to see some life come back. We're seeing Starbucks announce this week that they're opening 90% of their stores now. Shanghai Disneyland is not open, but its shopping district and hotels are starting to open slowly. So some areas are starting to open up. If we follow that trajectory where in a month or two, we're back to opening and we're all out in cabin fever, we're all out there and enjoying stuff, maybe it's just a matter of just slotting in Black Widow into the holiday weekend where it feels it can counter that with maybe something like a family fare or something, maybe an animated release over the Thanksgiving or something like that.
But, yeah, it would have a factor on everything that gets pushed out, you're not going to just forget that Scarlett Johannson made a movie and just let it go.
So you do have a case where Disney -- 2020 was already going to be a hard year for Disney, because 2019 was pretty much its studios Super Bowl. It had all six of the highest grossing movies of 2019. And, obviously, Marvel's Avengers: Endgame was basically the crowning achievement of that, but we had the ninth and final Star Wars movie, we had Toy Story 4, we had Frozen 2, we had a lot of hit movies out of Disney. And we weren't going to get that kind of ammo in 2020 anyway. Mulan and Black Widow, they're going to do great when they come out, but they're not going to do as well as Avengers: Endgame or, let's say, Aladdin maybe for Disney last year.
So you had a case where it was already going to be a drop-off, now it's almost, it's not a scapegoat but it's just a delay and it's going to hurt, yes.
Sciple: Right. I mean, those comps were already going to be very, very difficult for them.
Okay, Rick, so all these issues that we just laid out in the first half of the show are coming under conditions where Disney has a new CEO in charge. Bob Iger announced a month or so back that Bob Chapek, the chairman of Disney's Park, Experience and Products, will be the new chief executive. When you look at this leadership changeover occurring at this time of high stress for the business, how does that affect your view on how the company may be able to navigate these conditions?
Munarriz: Yes, it was definitely -- not that Bob Iger planned it this way, not that Bob Chapek wanted it this way, but it was, like you can't get any worse timing than the last week of February, when Bob Iger said, "Well, I'm not going to be CEO anymore, I'm going to stay behind the scenes for the next year and a half and handle creative issues/matters, but Bob Chapek is your new CEO." It's sort of like handing a baton in a relay race in the middle of a tornado. It was the kind of thing where you couldn't get a situation that would be worse.
Obviously, that was early February, before we even knew that Disney was going to be closing its parks, but we already saw the rippling of international travel dry down, of the cruise lines that's going to take a hit. So many of Disney's businesses were already going to take a hit, and then it just only got worse.
So obviously, Bob Chapek has been at the company -- not that he's been for a life at Disney -- but he's been heading up the theme parks before. He ran some studio stuff before that. So he's familiar with the company as a whole. He is a sound choice if you're going to hire from the inside, but you have a case where he's going to come in and everyone is going to remember his first chapter as this really hard-luck story, you know, it's almost like the end of Avengers: Endgame in reverse. You know, it starts from something horrific. How are we going to compensate for that?
So you do have a case where Bob has his hands full. And he's someone who is well respected by some people. And at least theme park enthusiasts feel that he was maybe cutting too many corners and depending too much on intellectual property in the parks, cutting live entertainment, everything was becoming Avengers this, Toy Story that. It was great for the park and attendance, but some people were saying, "Well, let's get back to the original rides and stuff like that."
So he was always going to be a controversial choice for some park enthusiasts, but in general, he's a smart guy who knows the company better than just about anybody. He just was dealt this terrible hand that he can't even play. So it's not even that he played the hand poorly, it's that he's not allowed to put down a card at this point until the dust settles.
Sciple: Yeah, I keep thinking about, in The Godfather where you got to tap in the wartime consigliere. Well, whether Bob Chapek was ready for that or not, it's time to be brought in for that role. Obviously, the thing people really jump to with much of the other parts of the business being closed down is, what does this mean for Disney+? Obviously, a great opportunity for them, people are going to be streaming more, a lot of kids are going to be home who need to be entertained. What kind of opportunity does this up for Disney+ to really grow its subscriber base?
Munarriz: Yeah, Disney+ is going to grow. That was inevitable even before people were stuck at home with their families with nothing to do but stream television and pretend to homeschool at this point. So I think you have a case where Disney+ was going to do well in any scenario. And, obviously, they just hit it out of the gate with 10 million subscribers in their very first day. A lot of them were signed up in the months before that, because Disney did a hard job selling that. It was 28.6 million subscribers as of early February. We don't have an updated figure yet, but that figure is going to continue to at least inch higher.
And Disney, of course, had a big hit right out of the gate with The Mandalorian. So you had a case where people were wondering, is Apple TV+, is Disney+, are these things going to matter? And while Apple TV+ was OK, it didn't really have that big hit the way Disney did; people gravitating to it. So obviously, Disney now needs to follow that up.
But they've done a couple of smart things with Disney+, one of them was, of course, Frozen 2, which wasn't supposed to be hitting Disney+ for a while, Disney said, "All right, people are at home, let's remind them what we're capable of. So boom, let's give them Frozen 2." And it's going to be interesting to see what they do with Onward. Because these theatrical release windows where they have to wait a certain time, put it out in the home video release, that people aren't buying anyway, and then release it to these digital services. It's going to be interesting how it plays out with Onward and possibly any other future releases.
An interesting side note to that is that Comcast, Universal parent -- which is obviously a Disney rival in just about every way -- took one of their movies, Trolls World Tour, and said, "All right, this movie window is not going to open for us." They're just going to sell it now for $20 a pop for anyone who wants to watch it at home. We don't know if this is what's going to legitimize this pay-per-view market, which has always been there for the old-school cable companies, but digital, it's never been a game changer when people can just Netflix and stream stuff without having to pay piecemeal for stuff. So we're going to see how this all plays out.
But, yeah, Disney+ is going to be huge. The problem is, will it be enough to offset what it loses in its media networks division on that side? Will it be enough to offset the theme parks and the sports and everything? And it clearly will not. It will help soften the blow somewhat, but it's not going to be that needle mover right now to compensate for the losses elsewhere in the near term.
Sciple: Right. It'll give management something to point to. You mentioned those tough comps for the studio division. There's really no getting around that, but they'll at least be able to point to Disney+, "Hey, our growth is going to be a big number. I don't know what that number is going to be, but it's going to be significant."
The other thing to think about is, through the rest of this month, Disney+ will be rolling out internationally in a significant way. So March 24, the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Spain. And then March 29 in India. When we look at this international opportunity, how should we be thinking about that as investors?
Munarriz: Yeah, definitely. And it's, obviously, great timing to be rolling out internationally, when people through Europe -- and India hasn't been as hard hit as some of the other areas, but basically, it's a global thing, obviously. It's the right service at the right time for people that need, kind of, assuring comfort food, wholesome family entertainment when their families are home. Not that Disney is everybody's cup of tea everywhere around the world, but it clearly is a global juggernaut of a brand, and this is the right time for it. So it should definitely have a lot of appeal internationally at a time when the streaming is going to be as popular as ever.
Sciple: But, yeah, to your point on how this may move forward this trend of maybe not even putting movies in theaters. A lot of folks have been talking about, maybe when it comes to Zoom or Slack, these collaborative software, that on the back end of this we could see consumer behavior change in a significant way. Does this accelerate that trend or not? Or, do we know yet?
Munarriz: Yeah, definitely. I mean, you talk about stuff like Zoom. My wife is a teacher and she's gotten a crash course in Zoom now because she's teaching her classes as of this week to her high school class through Zoom. So people are getting up to speed. You know, your grandparents and your parents that may have never bothered to say, "Oh, I'm going to stick with my Xfinity Comcast subscription forever, I'm never going to change." They're now, "Hey, wait a minute, all this content is here, I just have to enter my name and a password and have an internet connection."
So there's clearly going to be this big exodus away from maybe traditional media back to the new media, which is what we know is going to be a growth driver in the future, and this is definitely going to be a case where Disney can make some headway in here into educating the market -- a market that is pretty much led, it was one of the first media companies to be on Apple when iTunes store opened. So it was already future forward-thinking in that sense. Now, it's helping disrupt these release windows by putting out Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker a few days earlier on video, and the same thing now with Frozen 2.
So they really are at the forefront of making change right now, at a time when people are going to be stuck at home. So whether it's knitting or it's streaming. I'm going to be streaming more than knitting in the next couple of weeks.
Sciple: Yeah. And it is interesting, too, if you look at the track record of Disney over time, every time there's been a fundamental shift in how this content is distributed, Disney has seem to have been the most capable of taking advantage of that, whether it's moving to VHS or other distribution platforms. So this is another opportunity for them to really take advantage of that.
Moving back to the park stuff that we talked about in the first part of the show, obviously, it's going to be really challenging for them to have this big segment of the company closed for an indeterminate period of time. But are there any opportunities this might open up for Disney, having the parks closed and nobody in there? Is there any positive aspect to these parks being closed for Disney, the business?
Munarriz: I mean, there's no financial positive to them being closed, but if you think about the fact that they're still doing maintenance, you know, they don't have a full staff there, most of their staff are being paid, but they're told to stay home, as they should. But there is work being done. So a lot of attractions there that really need a little TLC sometimes don't get it when the Magic Kingdom opens at 7:00 in the morning and closes at midnight. There's not a lot of time to get work done.
And especially, when you look at Disney, in particular, some of their newer rides, more specifically, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance ride, which opened in December in Disney World and opened in January at Disneyland, it's an amazing high-tech ride, a trackless ride that involves about three or four, five different components. It basically spins your head, and you wonder, is this even possible at a theme park level? Well, it's been very buggy, because you can't just introduce a new technology with all these different factors that have to work perfectly.
And when the ride goes down, it's not like the Haunted Mansion, if it goes down for five minutes and then they resume. This ride goes down, it's down for an hour, an hour and a half, and it disrupts everything. So this ride that everybody wants to get on is an issue at Disneyland and Disney World. And this will be a good time to, at least, "Hey, let's run it through what we couldn't do before, we don't have to be basically taxing the machine, the system right now." They'll have time to fix that. They can, obviously, spruce up their parks. There is construction happening all over Disney parks.
But in Disney World, in particular, next year is the 50th anniversary of the Magic Kingdom. So basically, of the Walt Disney World Resort, and they have a lot of things that they're planning there. So they're building a Tron cycle ride at Magic Kingdom, they have a Ratatouille ride that's going to open at Epcot, they have a Guardians of the Galaxy roller coaster opening at Epcot. All these things can now function, can go being constructed at a quicker pace than before because you don't have park guests around. If you go to Epcot in the last few weeks, it is pretty much a hardhat zone where there's walls basically navigating around so many attractions that are just out of limits as they basically spruce up the park to make it more updated.
So you do have a case where in this downtime, Disney can be cleaner and more efficient, and so many other things and so many other new rides can be closer to opening once the park does open. So that's about the only silver lining. You're going to have a lot of people that are going to realize how much they missed these parks, and that could also have some kind of, like a lasting effect. But again, I mean, if we are in a recession or worse at the other end of this tunnel, it's not as if people are going to come running back to the parks. They're going to be running back to the job that they could find at that point.
Sciple: Right. At the end of the day, this is a luxury good that Disney is selling. I'll say, on the rides being shut down, I went to Universal Studios this summer, and it was really frustrating that their Hagrid ride was constantly breaking down -- we were fortunate to catch that lucky time when it was open for, but hopefully they can get those underway.
So obviously, when you look at the conditions Disney is facing right now, really a lot of challenges, we don't know how long this is going to persist, but as somebody who's been following this company for a long time, as we look out three years from now -- we look out at the portfolio that Disney has and the IP -- how attractive does the stock look today given the sell-off that it's had?
Munarriz: It looks very attractive to me. And again, I am a shareholder. I own, which was just one share back in 1986 -- when my girlfriend and eventual wife -- obviously, you have to marry someone that gives you a Disney stock as a gift when you're going out -- that is now a couple of hundred shares; not that it's split, I've just added to my position over time. So clearly, I'm feeling the pain of the stock that was up more than $150 back in November and now back down to the double digits.
So clearly I think it's [depressing] or else I wouldn't be -- you know, I'm holding on to it, it's just not sentimentally, I feel that the stock is a strong value here, but I was always concerned that back when the stock was having new highs is, next year 2020, looking back from the end of 2019, was going to be a challenge for Disney. But now the stock has discounted to the point where a lot of its businesses are just -- the stock has lost more than a third of its peak value at this point, even 40% or something, depending on how bad the market goes by the time you hear this -- is a case where it is an attractive company, there is nobody that is as good as Disney at having this ecosystem.
Maybe you think of a company like Apple that has a great ecosystem where people pay a premium for their stuff. Disney is the same way, people pay a premium to be at its theme park, and it raises its prices every year. People pay a premium to see its digital content, which is why Disney+ and its content was a hit out of the gate and is really the only legitimate threat right now to Netflix on this kind of scale. So you do have a company that's going to be very successful down the line, it's just going to be a very few rough months and possibly even a few rough quarters for the economy to get back into any kind of form, but definitely it is attractive now, and I definitely do see Disney stock higher a year from now, but I don't know where the bottom is. And anyone that could tell you is just guessing at this point.
I know it's very attractively priced to where it was a few months ago, that's for sure. And to me, that's good enough, because I do see it higher than current levels, but I don't know if we're anywhere close to the bottom if the news keeps getting worse.
Sciple: Yeah, absolutely. It's so hard to tell how long this is going to persist, but to your point, the parks, in particular, are those assets that really cannot be replicated by anyone else and they're all over the world. In every country just about anywhere in the world, people know the Disney princesses, they know this IP.
And assuming that, you know, the world returns to normal at some point in time, that's going to be an incredibly valuable asset. Just to go to your personal thought on Disney, what is your favorite piece of Disney IP? What gets you most excited to watch when their movies come out?
Munarriz: I'll be honest, I know a lot of people, they love the Marvel stuff or the Lucasfilm stuff. I'm a fan of the Pixar end of the spectrum, I love Toy Story. I love even stuff like Ratatouille. Onward, I feel really bad about Onward, because while they only sold, like, 39 million, I was not one of those, I was actually at Disney World that weekend, and I said, "I'll see it next weekend." And actually, I mean I had a ticket, an AMC ticket to see it Tuesday morning, when AMC decided on Monday night, we're going to close all our theaters [sic].
So you do have a case where, yeah, it stings as a Pixar fan, as someone that was so happy when Disney bought all of Pixar, because Pixar was an independent company until Bob Iger came in and spoke to Steve Jobs, and everybody said, "All right, let's just make this work." And took Lasseter and everyone into their fold.
So that is my favorite piece of IP as far as the studio goes. And, obviously, I'm a big fan of their theme parks. You know, I live in Florida, so to me, it's always like a home away from home. And I do have a place in Celebration, Florida, which is a town that Disney actually built. So obviously, I'm interweaved in all Disney things.
But, yeah, I think, Pixar, as far as their properties go, that's the one that excites me the most. Toy Story, in particular, four movies in, but anything Pixar has done, with rare exception -- I mean, maybe like The Good Dinosaur or something -- has always impressed me. And they've raised the bar. So that's one thing that I'm hoping to see, you know, what they do next coming out of this lull.
Sciple: Yeah, I'd tell you. I went to, again, to that same trip, where I went to Universal Studios, we went to Disney World. And I remember we walked through the new Toy Story Land, and I just felt like I just walked right into my childhood. And I don't know that there's really any other brand out there that can replicate what Disney has.
Last question I'll have for you, Rick, is, one of these days, these parks are going to open back up, and folks can go back there. You mentioned, you live in the area, you go to the parks all the time. Give us some pro tips for folks who are going to the parks. What should they do, what should they make sure to do?
Munarriz: For pro tips. Okay, I mean, the easiest tip is, if you're going to stay on Disney property, as a lot of people do -- not me, because as a local, I don't. But if you stay at a Disney hotel, take advantage of their extra magic morning hours and afternoons, where they let resort guests in an hour and stay a couple of hours after the park closes on set days, different parks. And if you're not going to do that, still, you want to arrive at the parks early. As someone who goes to parks, I've never seen people as miserable as a Disney park as I do around 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon, especially people arriving at that time where the lines are all long. You get there in the morning, in the afternoon, you go take a break anywhere. And Disney is some 40 square miles of stuff you can do, and then come back at night. Especially over the summer when the heat is unbearable in the afternoons, and come back and enjoy it at night, and right when it opens, are really the two best times; the bookends of the day are -- if you want to enjoy a Disney World trip, especially if you have a young family and you don't want your kids grumpy (or any other dwarf at this point), I think you really need to go early right when it opens and then take a break and then come back in the last couple of hours of the day, which is really when the Disney parks are at their prettiest and their best and their least crowded.
Sciple: Great advice, Rick. Thank you for joining us to share all your thoughts on Disney, and hope to have you again soon.
Munarriz: Thank you, Nick. Bye, everybody.
Sciple: As always, people on the program may own companies discussed on the show, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against the stocks discussed, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear.
Thanks to Austin Morgan for his work behind the glass. For Rick Munarriz, I'm Nick Sciple. Thanks for listening, and Fool on!
