The signs inside Terminal B at LaGuardia Airport told the story on Wednesday morning: “Real ID, Enhanced, Passport” with an arrow pointing to the right, and “All Others” with an arrow pointing to the left.

After years of warnings and postponements, “all others” are no longer enough to make it past airport security checkpoints. Travelers are now required to flash a federally compliant Real ID, a passport or another approved form of identification to board domestic flights.

Deadline day started off calmly at LaGuardia, with many passengers arriving up to three hours early, heeding warnings of delays or complications from the Real ID rollout. A large number of Transportation Security Administration employees, airport staff and police officers flanked the security entrance, advising travelers to prepare their IDs.

Arthur Perlman, 61, a former teacher from Queens who described himself as “slightly worried,” came four hours early for his flight to Texas. He had recently gotten a state ID card and presumed it was a Real ID.

But it had neither a star nor an American flag, meaning it was not compliant. “A week ago, I thought about it and went, ‘Oh my God!’” he said. “I did a reality check.”

He briefly panicked, until he learned that a passport is also valid. He had brought that to LaGuardia.

Real ID enforcement comes after 15 years of delays driven by states’ concerns over privacy and steep costs as well as the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite all the warnings and postponed deadlines, the government has still struggled to persuade people to get Real IDs.

States reported varying rates of Real ID compliance ahead of Wednesday’s deadline. In California, it was more than half of all driver’s licenses or ID cards. In Pennsylvania, it was 28 percent.

Travelers also received mixed messages about what to expect at airport security checkpoints when the deadline arrived. While the Transportation Security Administration repeatedly stated that full enforcement would begin on Wednesday, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, said on Tuesday that travelers who didn’t have a Real ID-compliant document would still be allowed to fly, after additional screening.

At Chicago Midway International Airport, Anthony Harris, a 19-year-old from Chicago who had just completed his freshman year at Hampton University in Virginia, flew home early Wednesday morning without a Real ID.

Mr. Harris, who had pulled an all-nighter to make his 5:45 a.m. flight, said he was not aware of the Real ID deadline when he arrived at the airport at 4 a.m.

“It was out of sight and out of mind. It had been a while since I’ve gone to the airport, so when I got there, I saw the signs and was like, ‘Oh, it is May 7,” he said.

He was allowed through security after going through extra screening but, he said, a T.S.A. agent gave him a notice warning, “The ID you presented is NOT Real ID-compliant.”

Inside busy Terminal C at Newark Liberty International Airport, where equipment failures and air traffic control staffing issues caused more than a week of heavy delays, security lines were moving fairly quickly, with an average wait time of 16 minutes early Wednesday, and no apparent separate line for travelers whose documents were not compliant with Real ID.

Several travelers said they were more concerned over the news that the air traffic controllers who coordinate planes at Newark had briefly lost contact with planes last week, prompting some of the controllers to take trauma leave from work.

“It’s not so much the delays; it was the safety,” said Marty Springer, a New Jersey resident who was flying to San Francisco using his passport. He had not yet been able to obtain a Real ID. New Jersey has one of the lowest Real ID rates in the country, with just around 17 percent of IDs reportedly compliant as of last week.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates Newark, LaGuardia and Kennedy International, said it had increased staffing and worked to increase public awareness of the deadline. “The Port Authority has been working closely with T.S.A., our terminal operators and all airport stakeholders to ensure as smooth a transition as possible as the federal government begins requiring Real ID at T.S.A. checkpoints,” James Allen, the agency’s chief communications officer, said in a statement.

Demand for Real IDs has surged as the deadline loomed, leading to long lines and frustration. On Tuesday, at the Real ID Supercenter in downtown Chicago, Juanita Yost, 53, was waiting to apply with two of her grown children.

Ms. Yost, a nurse, said she was going on vacation in a few weeks, and her daughter, a college student, was planning to fly to Minnesota soon.

It was their third attempt to get Real IDs. They had previously been turned away for not having the required documents. “Yesterday was freezing, and we got here at 9 o’clock in the morning and didn’t get in until almost 1 p.m.,” Ms. Yost said. “They did not communicate anything well.”

Finally, after about four hours, they had completed the application process, just before the center closed for the day. The only catch? Their new cards should take about two weeks to arrive in the mail.

Christine Chung and Nate Schweber reported from LaGuardia Airport, Michael Levenson from Newark Liberty International Airport, and Robert Chiarito from Chicago Midway International Airport.

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Americans, struggling with rising costs, have been looking for ways to cut back on nonessential spending. But Disney, so far at least, apparently does not count as a discretionary expense.

The company, reporting results for its winter quarter on Wednesday, said operating profit at its domestic theme park division had climbed 13 percent from a year earlier, to $1.82 billion. Revenue increased 9 percent, to $6.5 billion. Park attendance was up. Hotel room bookings were up. And spending on merchandise and food was up.

Disney also reiterated that its experiences division as a whole (including overseas parks, cruises, and games and other consumer products) was still on course to increase its operating profit as much as 8 percent for the year, compared with 4 percent in 2024. The division contributes roughly 60 percent of Disney’s annual profit.

The vibrancy of that business helped push Disney’s adjusted per-share income for the quarter up 20 percent, to $1.45, handily beating analyst expectations. Separately on Wednesday, Disney announced that it would team with the Miral Group to open its seventh theme park resort: Disneyland Abu Dhabi.

Speaking to analysts on a conference call, Robert A. Iger, the company’s chief executive, called the Abu Dhabi decision “a huge endorsement of that location,” noting the tourism growth expected for the United Arab Emirates capital.

Disney shares climbed 10 percent in early trading.

Disney has long been seen as a bellwether for consumer confidence. When ticket sales and hotel reservations at the company’s theme park resorts in Florida and California start to weaken, it’s usually a sign that Americans are growing pessimistic about the economy.

Wall Street has been worried. Passenger traffic at Orlando International Airport during the first quarter was down 4 percent from a year earlier, according to government data. Disney has also been rolling out steep discounts for the summer. On Tuesday, for instance, Walt Disney World near Orlando began selling “summer magic” discounts for Florida residents — multiday tickets can be had for as little as $60, a 40 percent savings.

Gavin Doyle, who runs MickeyVisit, a site unaffiliated with Disney that focuses on theme park vacation planning, said discounts probably reflected three challenges: consumer queasiness about the economy, a lack of new Disney rides to market and increased competition from the Universal Orlando Resort.

Whatever the reason, the price breaks seem to be working. Hugh F. Johnston, Disney’s chief financial officer, told analysts on Wednesday that vacation bookings at Disney World for the current quarter are up 4 percent compared with last year and the summer quarter is running 7 percent ahead.

“Quite strong,” he said.

Mr. Johnston added that Disney had seen almost no drop-off in overseas bookings — maybe 1 to 1.5 percent, he said. (News outlets have reported declines in visitors to the United States in general during the new Trump administration, especially from Europe and Canada. But a close look at the data shows it has so far been holding up.)

Disney also reported better-than-expected results for its flagship streaming service. Analysts had expected Disney+ to shed several million subscribers in the quarter because of price increases and programming cutbacks. Instead, Disney added 1.4 million, ending the period with 126 million. Disney’s direct-to-consumer division, which includes Hulu, had $336 million in operating profit, up from $47 million a year earlier.

But it was another crummy quarter for Disney’s traditional television business, which includes ABC and a portfolio of cable networks. Revenue fell 13 percent, to $2.4 billion, as viewership and advertising sales declined. Programming cutbacks (fewer new shows) allowed the division to eke out a 2 percent increase in operating profit ($769 million).

Higher costs at ESPN and a write-down related to Venu, a failed sports streaming venture, resulted in operating income of $687 million at Disney’s sports division, a 12 percent decrease from a year earlier.

Movies were largely a wash, as carry-over hits from the previous quarter, including “Mufasa: The Lion King,” were offset by clunkers like “Snow White.”

The most powerful home page in entertainment is about to look a lot different.

Beginning next week, Netflix will introduce a new home page design for television screens, the company’s first serious makeover since 2013. The redesign, which features fewer titles but more video and animation, is intended to present a sleeker look and get “people to press play, and stay,” the company said.

The last time Netflix debuted a major home page redesign, the streaming service had just over 30 million subscribers and was only starting to make its own original programs. It now has more than 300 million subscribers, has released thousands of original TV shows and movies and has remade the entire entertainment industry in its streaming image.

It’s a moment that the company is marketing as “the new Netflix.”

The new home page will have a navigation bar across the top of the screen, instead of being tucked away on the left side, as it has been. It will also feature what executives are calling “responsive recommendations,” which will serve titles on the home page based on what the subscriber has been searching for in near-real time. (Looking for horror? Here come a lot more horror recommendations.) And the new TV home page will have the ability to more prominently feature its new content types, like live programming.

“The real goal of this is, how do we make it easier, how do we make it simpler, faster for you to make a great decision?” Greg Peters, a co-chief executive of the company, said in an interview.

The redesign will start rolling out for all subscribers in the coming weeks and months. It will be only for television screens, which is where viewers do most of their Netflix viewing (70 percent, the company said).

The implications for the industry could be significant. Over the past decade, nearly all media companies copied Netflix’s TV home page when designing their own streaming services, with rows upon rows of titles.

Now the gap between Netflix and the traditional entertainment industry is so vast that HBO and Max executives say they would be happy to be considered as an “add-on” in households that already subscribe to Netflix. But at the same time, Netflix is locked in a battle for streaming TV time supremacy in the United States with YouTube. The Google-owned company has a fairly comfortable lead against Netflix, according to Nielsen, the research firm.

Company executives said they started dreaming up the new home page — the internal nickname is Eclipse — in late 2022.

Though Netflix’s home page has been revised and updated several times over the last decade, executives said the company was beginning to hit a wall with the old design.

For starters, there was just the look itself, with seemingly endless rows of titles and tiles, one that Steve Johnson, Netflix’s vice president of design, likened to a Blockbuster Video shelf. Eunice Kim, Netflix’s chief product officer, said, “The way that the old home page is built, you kind of see box art, box art, box art, box art.”

“It’s kind of suboptimal, right?” she added.

Subscribers firing up their Netflix app, she said, have traditionally been divided into two branches: about half who know exactly what they want to watch versus another half who have sort of an idea, or no idea at all. Ms. Kim said, however, that the not-knowing-what-they-want group had increased in recent years.

“That just means our product needs to work even harder to kind of introduce these titles to folks for the first time,” she said.

Enter Eclipse. Though the Netflix catalog remains as big as ever, the new home page will display fewer titles. When a subscriber hovers over a title, however, it will expand into a much bigger image on the screen. That image will be packed with information, including a brief description and badges that will say things like “highly rewatched,” “spent 13 weeks in the Top 10” or “Oscar nominee.”

After a couple of seconds, a preview video from the show or movie will then begin to play. (The company has found that people are more likely to watch a show or movie after seeing a clip.) The goal, Ms. Kim said, is “getting you to kind of slow down and notice a little bit more about the title versus scanning.”

Eclipse will also begin to quickly offer subscribers recommendations based on their searches, “something we’ve been pursuing really for a couple of years now,” Mr. Peters said.

If a subscriber is searching for family movies, for example, more and more real estate lower on the home screen will start to populate with family-friendly programming. On the old home page, it could take up to a day for the algorithm to catch up.

“In the same way that people might talk about a TikTok as being like, ‘Oh, gosh, it really seems to understand me,’ we want our members to be able to feel that way about our service, right — like we get them,” Ms. Kim said.

Executives believe Eclipse will also drive viewers more urgently to live events like a National Football League game, or a big fight.

“You see the livestream, and it’s not just a piece of artwork, but you see the animation, the motion, the energy of the fight going on, right when you turn on the TV,” Ms. Kim said.

Competitors seem eager to change up their home pages, too. Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, expressed some frustration with his company’s streaming home pages in an earnings call this year, saying they had “to be more dynamic” and lamenting that they were “fairly static in nature.”

Mr. Peters said that, with time, he hopes subscribers start to notice just how much better the new Netflix is. And then, he imagined, when they click over to their streaming competitors from Netflix, “those other experiences feel relatively static, maybe they feel a little bit old at some point in time, and stuck in the mud,” he said.

“You know,” he continued, “I wouldn’t be sad about that outcome.”

Mickey Mouse is headed to the Middle East.

In a new test for its singularly American brand, the Walt Disney Company said on Wednesday that it had reached an agreement with the Miral Group, an arm of the Abu Dhabi government, to build a theme park resort on the Persian Gulf. The property, the seventh in Disney’s global portfolio, will have a castle and modernized versions of some classic Disney rides, along with new attractions tailored to the climate and local culture.

“It’s not just about ‘If you build it, they will come,’” Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said in brief phone interview from Abu Dhabi. “You have to build it right. And quality means not just scale, but quality and ambition. We are planning to be very ambitious with this.”

Disney and Miral declined to give acreage, budget or construction timeline details for what they are calling Disneyland Abu Dhabi, except to say it will be a full-scale property on a par with Disney’s other “castle” parks. Miral is footing the entire bill for building the park. (New theme parks of this scale typically cost $5 billion or more.)

Arab leaders have long courted Disney, which expanded its theme park business to Japan in 1983, France in 1992, Hong Kong in 2005 and the Chinese mainland in 2016. At a Council on Foreign Relations event in 2018, Mr. Iger said the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had made an “impassioned plea” for Disney to build a theme park in his kingdom.

“I explained when we make decisions like this we consider cultural issues, economic issues and political issues,” Mr. Iger said then, declining to give further details of their “very frank” discussion. The region, he added at the time, “has not been at the top of our list in terms of markets that we would open up in.”

What changed?

For a start, the United Arab Emirates has grown into a tourist destination. Abu Dhabi, the capital, attracted roughly 24 million visitors in 2023, according to government figures. Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the country’s president, has set a goal of attracting 39 million visitors annually to Abu Dhabi by 2030. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, which opened in 2017, has been a hit. Warner Bros. Discovery opened a modest indoor theme park in the city in 2018, and SeaWorld Abu Dhabi arrived in 2023.

The Miral Group, which built Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi and SeaWorld Abu Dhabi, made Disney a hard-to-refuse financial offer: In addition to paying for construction, Miral will pay Disney to design the rides, shops, restaurants and accompanying hotels. Once the park is open, Disney will receive royalties for the use of its characters as a percentage of revenue, according to a securities filing. Disney will also receive other fees.

At the same time, Disney has come under pressure to find new areas for growth to offset declines in cable television and at the box office. By opening a theme park in Abu Dhabi, Disney hopes to create an engine that drives demand among the Middle East’s 500 million residents for other Disney products — princess dolls, Disney+ subscriptions, cruise ship vacations, Marvel movies, touring stage productions.

“After studying the region carefully, engaging with potential partners and visiting three times in the past nine months,” Mr. Iger said, “it became more and more clear that not only was the region right and ready for us, but the place to build was Abu Dhabi.”

Disneyland Abu Dhabi could allow Disney to tap into India’s expanding middle class. A direct flight from Mumbai to Abu Dhabi takes 3 hours 17 minutes. Currently, the closest Disney outpost to Mumbai is Hong Kong Disneyland, a six-hour flight away.

“In looking at some research that we’ve done recently, we determined that, for every person visiting one of our parks, there are 10 people in the world that have a desire to visit,” Mr. Iger said. “One of the biggest reasons they don’t — everybody always thinks immediately it’s affordability. It’s not. It’s accessibility. It’s a long trip to get to where we are for a lot of people.”

There will be obstacles. The climate is one. Disney will need to design a park that allows for visitation in scalding desert heat.

Disney could also face criticism for its partnership with the Emirates, which is ruled as an autocracy with limits to freedom of expression, speech and the press, and which provides arms to fighters accused of atrocities in a devastating civil war in Sudan. In November, Human Rights Watch slammed the National Basketball Association, which has made Abu Dhabi its Middle East hub, for helping the country to distract from its human rights record.

To attract more tourists and foreign investors, the Emirates in 2020 improved protections for women, loosened regulations on alcohol consumption and diminished the role of Islamic legal codes in its justice system. Criticizing the government or its leaders remains illegal, however, and can lead to long prison sentences. Migrant workers are often subject to inhumane conditions, according to human rights groups and the State Department. Homosexuality is illegal.

In 2022, the Emirates joined other Persian Gulf nations in banning “Lightyear,” a major film from Disney’s Pixar, because of a blink-and-you-missed-it kiss between a lesbian couple. “Lightyear,” along with some other content that features L.G.B.T.Q. characters, does not appear on Disney+ in the region.

In a statement, a Disney spokeswoman said, “We are respectful of the countries and cultures where we do business, while always adhering to our own standards and values.”

Disney faced a similar situation when it teamed with the Chinese government to build Shanghai Disneyland. In addition to awkward optics, the construction of that park required the contentious relocation of thousands of suburban Shanghai residents. (Disneyland Abu Dhabi won’t have that headache; it will rise on man-made Yas Island.)

Wall Street, however, is likely to applaud — especially given the troubled state of other Disney businesses, including cable television.

“Are theme parks now the best business in media?” Craig Moffett, a founder of the MoffettNathanson research firm, wrote in a report last year. “The answer is almost certainly ‘yes.’”