Among this year’s revelations were new trailers for Snow White, Mufasa: The Lion King and the new streaming Marvel series Agatha All Along. But there were also sneak-peeks at projects still in production, including the Star Wars film The Mandalorian & Grogu, the next Avatar film, the second season of the Star Wars series Andor, the film Tron: Ares, and confirmations for Toy Story 5, Frozen 3 and Frozen 4.

This year’s D23 is acutely significant, coming off the back of a rough couple of years for the studio. Several Disney animated films Strange World, Encanto and Lightyear bombed – a deep cut for a studio built on animation – while The Marvels was a rare dud on the studio’s hit Marvel slate and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was, well, not Indiana Jones’s finest hour.

Since the return of the studio’s charismatic, almost totemic CEO Bob Iger, its fortunes have turned around. Inside Out 2 has become the highest-grossing animated movie of all time with $US1.5 billion in box office takings, Deadpool & Wolverine is hurtling towards $US1 billion of its own, and there is enormous buzz around Moana 2, the sequel to a film which, in 2023, set streaming records.

Disney has “returned to glory with a vengeance”, Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian told CNBC last week. “They are in the midst of phenomenal comeback year for the studio.”

D23 also hosts three stadium “showcases” during the convention with crowds of about 12,000 sponsored by Visa, tickets for which are not included in the convention pass. The net effect: Disney shifts a substantial amount of their costs for D23 off their books.

Ayaz highlights the importance of using a tool like D23 in a rapidly changing media landscape, in particular, to connect with segments of the audience who have disconnected from traditional marketing methodologies, such as Gen Z.

“They spend a lot of time on their phones, they do not watch television the way that [earlier] generations have and do, and one of the greatest challenges is that they don’t necessarily engage with traditional marketing and advertising,” Ayaz said.

“They actually avoid advertising on social and mobile, so when we are marketing and when we are promoting, we have to make it feel organic and authentic to them,” he said. “It is a very different generation, but I think it’s a huge opportunity for us to engage with them in an authentic way.”

Perhaps the most misunderstood element of the Disney puzzle in mainstream consumer media is the balance between the various elements of the company’s core businesses.

The perception of Disney as a Hollywood film studio under-measures the importance and emphasis the company places on its theme park, cruise line and other businesses.

At D23, the announcement of a new theme park “land”, or a new Disney-branded cruise product, or this year’s announcement that the company’s iconic Disneyland in California will expand in size by almost 50 per cent in the coming years, is met with the same kind of cult-like excitement from fans as news of a new Star Wars, Marvel or Frozen movie.

On that point, the expansion will not increase Disneyland’s 488-hectare site, but by converting parking lots into multi-storey structures – thanks to a generous rezoning from the city of Anaheim – the park can expand to house new “lands”, including the wintry Arendelle from Frozen and the metropolis of Zootopia. The expansion will take a decade and cost $US1.9 billion.

Tying all of those strands together – Star Wars movies, Snow White reboots, Frozen toys and expansions to Disneyland – is the job of D23, where the studio goes in for the hard sell, and the diehard fans don’t seem to mind. Nobody here is clicking the “opt-out” link.

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“Having our social media terms and influencers in that room, there are clips and moments and highlights going out and being served to the fans all over the world,” Ayaz says.

“Whether [they are] a fan of a comic book, our content on YouTube, or engaging with us on gaming, our publishing or our consumer products.”