Out / In

Endor / Anywhere
Adventures by Disney / Destinations by Disney
Charging for Internet / Free Wi-Fi
DVC Construction / Affordable Family Suites
Parades / Street Parties
LOST / ???
Broadcast TV / Apple TV
Stitch / Harry Potter
Open Seas / Desert
High School Musical / TRON
Rasulo / Staggs

Endor / Anywhere
Star Tours 2.0 is set to appear at Disneyland. Instead of a single destination, now passengers are going to get some randomization in their journey. Short of Captain EO returning, this will be a bit hit.

Adventures by Disney / Destinations by Disney
Disney’s experiment with leading tours will continue. But they’ll be closer tied to specific destinations as Disney Cruise Line expands its horizon.

Charging for Internet / Free Wi-Fi
This is just a guess, but I expect more Disney hotels to offer free wi-fi and perhaps even provide it in the parks as well. The growth in mobile computing will play a large part in this trend.

DVC Construction / Affordable Family Suites
Hopefully Disney is done building Disney Vacation Club rooms for a while. I think the balance has gotten out of wack with way too many deluxe rooms and not enough priced at family budget levels. This will be even more true when the Four Seasons opens. So Disney needs to advance their plan to convert some rooms into Family suites and they need to immediately add more value rooms. If this can’t be done at Flamingo Crossings, Disney might want to consider building some on their own. If they could go the modular green home way, they might even start a trend across the nation.

Parades / Street Parties
The last fifteen years of parades at Disneyland and Walt Disney World has been trending to near stagnation when it comes to new parades. I think they’re still shy from the big budget parades that bombed when it came to attracting seats on the curb. But the street party idea has shown a lot of adaptability. It has a lower budget, and therefore a lower risk, and can be changed completely every few years. It also works in small areas where a big parade might otherwise provide too much congestion. Look for this concept to come to DAK and EPCOT in the near future.

LOST / ???
ABC’s hit TV show LOST goes away this year. So far nothing has stepped up to takes its place. ABC’s quest to build a show with an audience of the same size will play out. As it turns out Joss Whedon (Toy Story, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is currently free from long term TV commitments. Perhaps he might be available to take a meeting. Or perhaps bring back the ‘Disneyland’ Sunday night hour and take advantage to tell some great Disney stories and sneak in some previews of what’s coming to Disney Parks around the world.

Broadcast TV / Apple TV
2010 marks the beginning of the end for broadcast television. ABC and Disney have already committed to making content available to Apple TV which will put content in the homes of viewers independent of cable TV and the local networks. The arrival of the iSlate (or whatever they’re calling the tablet computer these days) will hasten the switch to a new form of content delivery.

Stitch / Harry Potter
Hopefully we’ll be able to do away with cartoon characters in Tomorrowland when Harry Potter lands at Universal’s Islands of Adventure. Disney will have to compete with some fantasy of their own. That should put the focus back on Fantasyland for cartoons and leave Tomorrowland for actual vision about what tomorrow may bring.

Open Seas / Desert
Yes, Disney has announced a 4th Pirates Of the Caribbean adventure, but 2010 will belong to the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

Zemeckis MoCap / TRON
Okay, actually 2010 will belong to TRON Legacy, the long awaited sequel to TRON. The cartoonish animation that Zemeckis style Motion Capture generates will be replaced with something much closer to Avatar’s ability to create a new reality. Disney and Pixar have years of experience creating stories that will work with the new tech, they will start to apply themselves in 2010. While TRON 2.0 is not exactly avatar, it’s a step in the right direction.

Rasulo / Staggs
This has already happened. Jay Rasulo has moved from the head of Disney worldwide Parks and Resorts to the land of excel spreadsheets and Thomas Staggs has given up his budget crunching position for one of fantasyland and hard facts. It’s a bit of a gamble, but I think it will work. It better because the word is that Iger is using this move to groom Staggs as his replacement. Hopefully Rasulo won’t make the same mistakes he made in finance that he made while running Disney parks.