Disney Park Sees a 45 Percent Drop in Profits After Record-Breaking Year, Endangering the Its Future

It’s hard to fully grasp the complexity of a multinational business like The Walt Disney Company. With its parks and movies all over the globe, Disney sometimes has to resort to creative accounting to understand the global economy and its impact on the company.

Disney also has to be creative with its debt in order to appease its shareholders and create the kind of profits that Wall Street is looking for. However, at some point, those “creative” debt techniques come back to haunt them.

Disney is learning the hard way just how difficult that can be when those creative debt techniques come due. Disneyland Paris has announced that its profit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2025, was down 45.3 percent to $98.2 million as a result of debt payments that are, in some cases, decades old.

When Disneyland Paris was being built, it was done as a public/private partnership between Disney and the French Government. At the time, the French government required Disney to build its newest park in conjunction with the government, which also helped Disney keep competition out of the area.

Rather than Disney footing the entire bill for the parks, as it had done with its American parks, Disneyland Paris was financed by borrowing from banks and money lent from The Walt Disney Company. Then, in the early 1990s, even before the park opened, Disney began work on a second park, Disney-MGM Studios, an exact copy of the one in Florida.

However, a severe recession caused that park to be shelved until 2002, but not before Disneyland Paris amassed another $200 million in debt. Eventually, Walt Disney Studios opened, but it was during the post-9/11 recession, and the park struggled.

In 2017, Disney took full control of the park and its operating company, again refinancing its debt. Disney was able to get Disneyland Paris nearly entirely out of debt, but when attendance started slipping in 2017, Disney announced that it was investing $2.1 billion on the “biggest expansion in the park’s history.”

That money was spent on a new Avengers Campus, Frozen land, and the upcoming Lion King land. Those investments paid off last year, as Disneyland Paris saw a 7.4 percent increase in revenue to a record $3.5 billion. So, why was the profit so low?

All of these creative accounting techniques have finally come back to bite Disney after decades of putting them off. Despite getting the park’s debt down to zero, Disney could only accomplish that feat by pushing it off until 2024.

So, despite record revenue and what appears to be record guest spending, Disneyland Paris is once again in trouble because of Disney’s creative accounting.

What are your impressions of Disneyland Paris? Let us know in the comments.