It was the end of an era at Walt Disney's (NYSE: DIS) Florida resort over the weekend. Muppet*Vision 3D, an attraction that entertained visitors to Disney's Hollywood Studios for more than 34 years, closed after its final guest performance on Saturday night. It's the latest long-running experience to get shuttered at Disney World.

Earlier this year, guests saw its Test Track adrenaline booster ride close down. Animal Kingdom also surrendered some of its capacity in 2025, nixing a few original experiences including the TriceraTop Spin flat ride and the It's Tough To Be a Bug 3D show inside the park's signature Tree of Life focal point.

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The closures will continue, with the Magic Kingdom gated attraction in Florida getting in on the clearance sale. Tom Sawyer Island and the Liberty Square Riverboat, along with the Rivers of America that both experiences cross, will run dry after July 6. Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin in Tomorrowland will pause the following month, for less than infinity, to see if it can go beyond with its intergalactic target blasting ride.

The endings don't end there. Two of Disney World's most thrilling rides, Dinosaur and Rock 'n' Roller Coaster, will close early next year.

There's never a good time to take down a handful of high-volume attractions, but Disney knows what it's doing. It's shuttering a lot of experiences to use the space as a fresh easel for its next generation of experiences. You probably don't want to bet against the House of Mouse.

Disney's leisure business has some surprising momentum right now. The media stock giant came through with a blowout fiscal second-quarter report last month, and Disney's theme parks business was the biggest reason for the stock's 24% surge in May. Its domestic parks and experiences business delivered a 9% increase in revenue through the first three months of this calendar year. Disney's operating profit came through with a 13% gain. The company's announcement of plans for a new licensed theme park in Abu Dhabi also turned heads.

This is a sharp contrast to how its largest rival Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) fared in the same three months. It experienced a 5% top-line slide for its theme park operations with a sharp 32% drop in the segment's adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA).

Unlike Disney's high-flying shares, Comcast stock rose a mere 1% in May. That's a stunning contrast, and one to monitor now that Comcast opened its Epic Universe theme park a few miles away from Disney World.

Image source: Disney.

There will be a lot of closures this year through early 2026, but this should be a case of addition through subtraction. Disney knows it will upset some fans with retiring some long-running attractions, but it's betting on making things better. In late 2023, it boosted its goal of investing $30 billion on its theme parks and cruise ships business over the next decade to a cool $60 billion.

Almost everything closing now will be replaced by experiences that should be even more popular. In the case of Test Track and Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin, the two rides will return with enhancements. Test Track's redo promises nods to the original attraction it took over. Buzz Lightyear's makeover is about looking ahead, updating the moving laser shooting gallery with detachable blasters, targets that are more responsive after being hit, and different-colored lasers so you don't get lost in a sea of red dots as before.

The other attractions will open as new experiences. You won't have to wait long for the updated Test Track and a Zootopia-themed takeover for It's Tough To Be a Bug. They will both make their debut later this year. The refreshed Buzz Lightyear dark ride will reopen next year, while the Muppets will take over for Aerosmith as hosts of the soon-to-be former Rock 'n' Roller Coaster. Tropical Americas will replace DinoLand at Animal Kingdom in 2027 with an Indiana Jones attraction, Disney's first Encanto-themed ride, and a one-of-a-kind carousel.

The timeline gets fuzzier after that. The closure of Muppet*Vision 3D over the weekend will clear the way for an area themed to Pixar's Monsters franchise, including a suspended roller coaster. The resurfacing of Frontierland's throwback attractions will be replaced by a Cars-themed land, and eventually the long-overdue area dedicated to Disney's signature villains.

In short, Disney has stocked the pond with years of attendance-boosting attractions. When it doubled the segment's budget to $60 billion, the entertainment behemoth mentioned that 70% of that should go to increasing capacity. The balance will go to infrastructure and tech improvements. This is a lot of money, averaging $6 million a year. You have to go back to pre-pandemic times for the last time Disney posted an annual profit larger than $6 million. However, Disney knows you have to keep raising the bar and rejuvenating guest experiences to keep folks coming back.

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It's been 24 years since a major theme park has opened in the U.S., so Thursday's official grand opening of Comcast's (NASDAQ: CMCSA) Epic Universe is a pretty big deal for the gated attractions industry. After more than a month of highs and lows during paid guest previews, Comcast was ready for its national -- and international -- close-up.

Epic Universe got off to an encouraging start on Thursday morning. All 11 rides were running an hour into the opening, a rarity for anyone who visited during the previous weeks of technical rehearsals. Outside of a five-hour wait for the signature Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry attraction, the remaining experiences had wait times of 30 minutes or less. An hour later, the buggy Battle at the Ministry ride was down, and the queue was not accepting new guests until the delay had passed.

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A lot of time and money has gone into the park that was originally announced to open in 2023, and the theme park enthusiast community and investors have been trying to figure out if this would boost Comcast's prospects or diminish Walt Disney's (NYSE: DIS) dominance in this space.

In short, Thursday's refreshingly successful opening shows that Comcast's Universal Orlando resort is ready to become a larger force in the theme park market. It doesn't mean Disney has to lose in the process.

It's a levitation spell

I was able to kick the tires of Epic Universe across three visits in late April.

I saw the park at its best, a day of light crowds and ideal weather, when it closed three hours early for a private event. I also saw it at its worst, dealing with the downtime and ride glitches that will get better over time, but also the lack of shade and plethora of stairs that will only get worse for guests as we dig deeper into summer. I was also there for the first day that experienced a weather delay for paid guests, a problem in Florida, since it shut down all but three rides for more than two hours.

Despite the negatives, I was blown away by the positives. It's not just about the three bar-raising signature ride experiences. The rest of the industry will have to take note of how immersive and detailed and just flat-out gorgeous Epic Universe can be. This summer will be brutal between the heat and perpetual afternoon thunderstorms, but when the weather turns in late autumn, it will be a hard place to resist.

Image source: Getty Images.

I am happy to be both a Comcast and Disney shareholder. Epic Universe will bring no shortage of visitors to the Orlando area, but the capacity constraints of the new park will find guests checking out other area attractions until it builds out more high-capacity attractions. It's a process that will take years to fully flesh out.

Comcast will be the biggest beneficiary, naturally. The older Universal Orlando parks will gladly take Epic Universe visitors on days when a visit to the shiny new park isn't optimal. Disney could also experience an uptick in traffic if the overall tourist counts to the area spike in the next few quarters.

Comcast can use the boost. Its theme parks business reported a 5% dip in revenue and a 32% slide in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) in the first quarter of this year. Disney held up considerably better in the same first three months of this year. Its stateside parks and experiences segment posted a 9% jump in revenue and a 13% increase in operating profit.

As I file this piece -- three hours into the first day of Epic Universe's grand opening -- Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry is still down. Folks who got in bracing for a 300-minute wait will have to tough it out a bit longer, or abandon the queue and take advantage of the still reasonably short wait times of 45 minutes or less for the rest of the rides. It's too beautiful a park to be stuck in one confined space for longer than anyone should have to, but that's just another reason why both Comcast and Disney are winners on this historic day.

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Rick Munarriz has positions in Comcast and Walt Disney. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Walt Disney. The Motley Fool recommends Comcast. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

It's official. As was widely expected, The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) will be launching a stand-alone streaming version of sports-focused cable channel ESPN later this year, at a price point of $29.99 per month. Its effective monthly price will be even lower for consumers who also subscribe to Disney+ and Hulu.

The launch of this service also likely marks the beginning of the end of the cable television industry as known today, even if it doesn't mean an immediate and complete collapse.

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Here's what investors need to know.

Image source: Getty Images.

Disney is taking on already-battered competition

The world knew it was coming sooner or later -- CEO Bob Iger confirmed it in early 2024. The only question then was the timing, price, and the prospective impact that a cooperative sports-centric streaming package from Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery might have on the overall marketability of a streaming service that only included ESPN's programming. That joint venture between Disney, Warner, and Fox has since been indefinitely blocked by a federal court, but Disney is clearly proceeding with its plans to offer an affordable version of ESPN that doesn't require a cable subscription.

That's a problem for cable companies like Comcast's (NASDAQ: CMCSA) Xfinity and Charter Communications' (NASDAQ: CHTR) Spectrum, both of which were already bleeding cable customers.

The graphic below tells the tale. Xfinity shed another 427,000 cable-television customers last quarter to bring the count down to just under 12.1 million, for perspective, extending a long-lived decline from the 2013 peak of nearly 23 million. Spectrum's TV headcount now stands at 12.7 million customers, thanks to last quarter's loss of 127,000, well down from its peak more than a decade ago.

Data source: Comcast Corp. and Charter Communications Inc. Chart by author.

These two cable powerhouses aren't unique in their customer attrition either, even if they are the biggest with the most customers to lose. Consumer market research outfit eMarketer reports the total number of paying cable-television customers in the United States has been culled by one-third of its 2013 peak, with non-cable households eclipsing cable TV's headcount of last year.

The advent of a streaming version of ESPN, however, could prove even more problematic for the cable business by accelerating this attrition for a couple of related reasons.

Ripe for (major) disruption

Again, the cable-television industry was already on the ropes, and as such, makes an easy target for a novel newcomer.

To the extent the cable TV business had any hope for a turnaround, though, it's now been wiped away.

See, Disney's ESPN isn't just a well-known and well-loved sports venue. It's the leading name of the sports-television market, accounting for nearly 30% of the nation's total sports viewership, according to numbers from TV ratings agency Nielsen. Adding Disney's ABC sports-branded programming to the mix pumps that number up to more than 40%.

Connect the dots. It's not just the biggest name in the business. Disney's got size-based leverage to exert in a myriad of ways.

Don't be surprised to see other studios mirror Disney's move, either, albeit with less scale and lower-priced streaming bundles of their sports-based programming.

Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery have already shown interest in looking beyond conventional cable for distribution of their sports-centric content, while several standard streaming services like Paramount's Paramount+, Warner's Max, and even Amazon's Prime also air the occasional exclusive sporting event. Most professional sports leagues and even a handful of individual teams now even offer their own streaming packages.

The point is, once Disney blazes the trail, the launch of many other new sports-centric streaming platforms from major studios wouldn't be a major leap.

That's a problem for the cable television industry for one simple reason. That is, live sports is the single biggest reason consumers still pay for cable television. A recent survey performed by CableTV.com indicates that 27% of these subscribers still pay a steep monthly price specifically for access to sports programming. The next-nearest reason is consumers' comfort with conventional cable, although it's difficult to imagine most of these people not being comfortable enough at this point to at least consider an alternative.

Whatever's in the cards, it works against cable companies' bottom lines.

Finally, at a turning point -- or the edge of a cliff

There was a time when content producers and content creators like Disney were in a symbiotic relationship, where the two parties helped one another without hurting one another. That's not the situation anymore. These relationships evolved into competition just a few years back. Now, with Disney's direct foray into the most important sliver of the television arena, it's become a full-blown competition that cable companies can't win -- studios just don't need middleman distributors anymore.

More to the point for investors, what's bad for an already beleaguered cable TV industry is good for Disney, and perhaps even disproportionately better.

Whereas the cable industry only pays Disney on the order of $10 per month per subscriber for the right to air ESPN's programming, Disney will be collecting three times that amount by selling the exact same content directly to subscribers. While sports currently makes up a little less than one-fifth of Walt Disney's revenue and roughly one-tenth of its operating income, both could swell if this new streaming-ESPN venture works out.

Bottom line? Cable stocks like Charter and Comcast were already tough to own. Now they're even less compelling. Conversely, The Walt Disney Company is finally addressing the ongoing shrinkage of its linear (cable) TV arm with a business model it's already proven it's great at. It brings plenty of marketing firepower to the table as well. This just might be the catalyst needed for the long-awaited turnaround from Disney stock.

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Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $635,275!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $826,385!*

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John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. James Brumley has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Walt Disney, and Warner Bros. Discovery. The Motley Fool recommends Comcast. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.