Disney is spending more on theme parks than it did on its iconic movies

There is nothing small about Walt Disney World. It is made up of four separate theme parks in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., near Orlando, with combined annual attendance of 56 million. The resort sprawls across 25,000 acres, an area nearly twice the size of Manhattan. A steel beam needed to build an “Avatar” attraction last year was so massive that Disney had to borrow crawler-transporters from NASA.

Now Disney World — and Disney’s global vacation empire — is about to get much, much bigger.

With its television business facing significant challenges in the streaming age, and lots of popular movie