How Disney Ditched Families To Profit Off The ‘Disney Adult’

The Walt Disney Company will hold one of its largest annual events this week, but it isn’t for children. D23, held in Anaheim, California, is “The Ultimate Disney Fan Event” that showcases upcoming movies, theme park additions, and cruise line offerings. Many attendees will cosplay as their favorite Disney characters and travel across the country for the event’s exclusive merchandise, pin trading, and panels. With special tickets priced as high as $2,599, D23’s premium pricing structure reveals that this isn’t a family-oriented experience.

Disney’s D23 is a convention for adult superfans. This is antithetical to the vision of its founder, Walt Disney, who wanted to build theme parks where parents and children could spend time together. “We believed in our idea: a family park,” he famously said when asked why he built Disneyland. 

In the years since Walt’s passing, the company has cycled through several executives and branding strategies, trying (and sometimes failing) to find new ways to engage families. However, it has found a new, far more profitable target demographic: Disney adults. Armed with far more disposable income than the parents Disney once tried to court, these adults are trapped in their nostalgia. They are willing to shell out thousands of dollars on exclusive merchandise, visits to the theme parks, hotel stays, vacation clubs, and “special events” like D23. Certain parks will hold “festivals,” which primarily consist of offering themed craft cocktails, which can cost up to $39 each. Two adults can easily spend as much as $10,000 for a week-long stay. For middle-class American families, these prices make a trip to Disney World totally out of reach.

Hardcore Disney adults can live in a planned community controlled by the company. Disney’s first town, Celebration, Florida, opened in the 1990s. It was crafted to emulate the same small-town nostalgia of Main Street, USA, with extremely strict homeowners association guidelines and carefully crafted parks and boulevards that many residents compared to “The Truman Show.” Golden Oak, another residential community built inside Disney World property, has luxury homes that sell for between $4 million and $15 million. Additionally, their HOA fees can be up to $34,000 per year, a price that hundreds of residents are willing to pay to live in the shadow of Cinderella’s castle.

Disney adults are willing to invest an exorbitant amount of money into the fandom. Average families can’t compete. Disney’s adult-oriented pin trading fandom has also exploded in popularity, with collectors of rare pins spending hundreds of dollars. A Wall-E pin that originally cost $12.95 recently sold for $1,499, while an Elsa pin sold for over $1,300. 

The high costs of vacations, merchandise, and even houses are worth it for thousands of die-hard Disney devotees. At least 35% of the people visiting Disney parks have no children, but estimates believe that figure may be closer to 50%. Adult fans have launched full-time careers as Disney influencers, filming themselves walking around the parks or “DisneyBounding,” which allows adults to dress up as Disney characters without breaking the parks’ rules restricting adults from explicitly wearing character costumes. One group of influencers known as the “Plus Size Park Hoppers” has exploded in popularity. Their content revolves around their experiences being “plus-size” at Disney World, and they will film themselves testing whether or not rides and roller coasters are “size inclusive.”

They claim they do it to “be as happy as possible,” a message that has been parroted by other Disney influencers. “It’s a place to go back to your childhood and relive all of the good things that come with being a kid,” said one fan. Another said she relied on Disney “to fill gaps for issues I didn’t want to face, including personal trauma.” One fan has taken her obsession so far that she is currently going viral for seemingly stalking the park’s Peter Pan actors over the course of years.

Disney has played into the growing popularity of Disney adults. Recent movie releases have pushed storylines that appear aimed at adults more than children and families. Films such as “Inside Out 2” and “Turning Red” made major plot points out of emotional turmoil, and “Soul” talked extensively about death. These topics are far too complex for young children, yet Disney still integrates them as a way to appeal to adults who want to stay in the comfort of Disney’s bubble.

By moving in this direction, Disney has destroyed Walt’s original vision of providing a joyful place for families. While he wanted his products to appeal to adults as well as children, it seems doubtful that he would be satisfied with the takeover of childless fans. Online, many Disney adults will make videos and memes about how they find children annoying and “hate” kids. The current culture believes that children are a burden, and we have a declining birth rate to prove it. Disney is only making this crisis worse by shifting its business model away from families and toward adults who are lured in by nostalgia and escapism.

D23 is the perfect example of the company’s changing demographics, relying on obsessive adults to pay exorbitant prices to see a sneak preview of the newest theme park ride or animated movie. With the time they should be investing in starting families, Disney adults are instead trying Snow White-themed cocktails and buying Wall-E pins. Our culture should expect better. Disney adults are trapped in their own adolescence, and we are all worse off because of it.

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Brooke Brandtjen is a writer and journalist from Wisconsin who focuses primarily on culture, politics, and religion. She is a senior contributor at New Guard Press, a publication she joined while attending Hillsdale College.

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