Villains Kill the Disney Magic for some Guests

[Stu]

This weekend saw Disney hold a special event at Disney Hollywood Studios, called 'Villains Unleashed'. Was this a success or was it a failure?

Disney put on a lavish, highly entertaining night with lots of rarely seen Disney characters making an appearance. If you went with the mind set that you weren't going to see everything and that the crowd level were going to be high then you may have come away with a positive experience.

It seems that the event was an improvement over last year's 'Unleash the Villains Friday the 13th event' which was included in park admission, where the park was full to capacity, nearly 40,000 people all trying to get in to a small entertainment area!

For this year, Disney made it a ticketed event, with advance tickets costing $71.36 and on the night $75.62 with limited numbers of tickets available.

Even with the high ticket price, limited numbers and with Disney adding more attractions which were spread across the whole park, very long wait times for the characters were experienced by guests. Some of the lines stretched to 3 hours long, that is over half of the event duration (8pm - 1am). There were lines of over an hour just to purchase some of the merchandise too.

Here on the DIBB, other Disney fan sites and social media there seems to be a mixed response to this event. Many reports have indicated that it was a waste of money, people have complained to Disney and some managed to get a refund.

This begs the question, is the commercial side of Disney killing some of the 'MAGIC' ?

My own opinion on this is that I do feel the commercial aspects are outweighing the magic at these special events. Whilst I fully understand that Disney want to sell as many tickets as they can. I do feel that Disney set the ticket number limit a lot higher now than they would have done a few years ago. MNSSHP seems an example of this. 10 years ago the MNSSHP party, even on sold out dates, seemed a lot less crowded that it has been in the last couple of years.

Just for clarity, I'm not one who wears 'rose coloured' or 'Fairy dust' spectacles when it comes to Disney being a business. Disney's main goal is to extract as many Dollars from each of their guests pockets as they possibly can. I am absolutely fine with this, this is the reality of the business and I visit Disney with my eyes fully open.

There does come a point though where the 'Value for Money' is diminished for these special events. Reading a lot of the reports coming out of 'Villains Unleashed' event it seems that many guests feel that they didn't get the Value for Money they would have expected from Disney.

What are your thoughts on this?

[Jollymon]

We went to MVMCP last year and only toured one side of the park, it was a lot more crowded than other evenings during our trip.

Disney is of course a business and a billion dollar one at that, however despite my realistic expectations I still felt that this specially limited ticketed event wasn't worth the "extra" entertainment and the higher crowds.

Each to their own, however we won't be forking out to attend MNSSHP on this trip. I don't see where the value is in the extra admission ticket

[amy56]

Originally Posted by facebook posts

Wayne Dixon
Same here we basically paid $200 to watch fantasmic.

See more...

Us too - though as there were four of us, we had the privilege of paying $280!

[DonkeyKong]

As always you do have the choice of whether or not to hand over your dollars.

Last year we decided not to attend the MNSSHP event because we thought it was too expensive on top of the Disney tickets that we had already paid over £1000 for.

Instead we enjoyed the HalloWishes fireworks from the Polynesian Resort's beach.

[Guest]

The magic was certainly turned off for my family on this event - so it was an awful lot of money to waste when you've paid $285 to watch an ok cabaret circus show and Fantasmic.
The idea is great and if handled properly would be a great event - but it was handles very badly.
Every other experience we've had out here so far has been superb - this one fell very short on promise against delivery and that isn't good enough for Disney.

[Nettings]

We attended MNSSHP last year - the Q's were horrendous for attractions and candy. It wasn't worth the extra we paid. When we had attended previously there were minimal crowds and easy access to candy. We won't bother doing this event again.

[IANF]

We were there on Saturday night and thought it was a disaster from start to finish!
We arrived at 18.00 (2 hours prior to the event start), Plan was to get photos with rarer characters first (Malificent, Snow White witch,Barbossa and Darth Vader) then go to the Streets of America area to get the rest as they were all grouped together, this would leave the 2nd half of the night for the shows... how wrong we were!
Got to the Malificent queue area at 18.30 (90 mins prior to event start) where we were told by a CM that the queue was already at 90 mins! That's a 3hr wait for 1 picture, unfortunately this was the reoccurring theme of the night, literally got 1 pic all night with Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars after queuing for an hour!
The main show hosted by Hades was so busy literally every area that the stage could be viewed from was rammed full, right down the Main Street to the entrance!
Even the drinks stands had a 30+ min wait for a speciality drink.
The so called free face painting had... you guessed it 45min plus wait times for a mediocre face painting(think small shapes, not full face painting like HHN.)
We usually do MNSSHP and HHN which we love but this was a complete rip off which we won't ever book again!
Ended up seeing one 30min show and getting 1 photo all night due to the queues( tried for Maleficent and Shan Yu from Mulan 90mins prior to park closing and was told the queue was finished due to amount of people in front!
Bad effort Disney!

[DIBBadmin]

This thread has been automatically closed as it has not been posted on in 365 days.