EuroDisneyland
While one core group of Imagineers was putting the finishing touches on the Disney-MGM Studios park, another was hard at work scouting for a location for Disney’s first European theme park. After a brief head-to-head between France and Spain to see who could offer Disney the best financial package, Euro Disneyland was approved for the small village of Marne-la-Vallée about 20 miles outside of Paris.
EuroDisneyland was on track for a 1992 debut, and when it opened, it would be a game-changer.
Even today, Disneyland Paris is often regarded as the most beautiful Disney Park on Earth. Effortlessly merging the charm and storybook scale of Disneyland with the grandeur and magnificence of Magic Kingdom, the French park is drenched in lavish decoration and detail. Even “classic” Disney attractions were swept away in the romance of Europe, reimagined in the form of the Lost Legend: Space Mountain – De la Terre à la Lune and the Modern Marvel: Phantom Manor.
Given that the Euro Disney project promised to be Michael Eisner’s legacy with the company, absolutely no expense was spared – authentic props, local artisans, real building materials… the depth and texture of Disneyland Paris is astounding. But outside the park, Disney’s property in Paris was already establishing itself as a modern, multi-park resort…
Unlike Disneyland (retroactively turned into a resort by landgrabs and cannibalizing its own parking lot) or Tokyo Disney (literally creating new space with bayside land reclamation), the Euro Disney Resort was ready for expansion from the start. It was, after all, the first purpose-built resort to use the now-standard approach: a Hotel District, connected via a Shopping District to an “Esplanade” serving as an estuary of guests outside of a park’s grand entrance.
Even from the start, though, something else was unique about the Euro Disney Resort: it had already factored in the location of a second gate. In fact, even before Euro Disneyland opened, Disney had agreed to open a second theme park on the property within a decade, and had even chosen its theme…
The Disney-MGM Studios Europe
In 1989 – bolstered by the immediate success of the Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando and certain that the under-construction Disneyland Paris would be a triumph – a French follow-up was announced when Michael Eisner told the LA Times:
“In addition to the already opened television and motion picture animation company in France, employing 100 artists, we are excited at the prospect of bringing additional full-scale movie and television production to Europe while providing guests with the entertainment magic of a second Disney theme park.”
Just as Imagineers had redesigned Disneyland to appeal to European audiences, the Disney-MGM Studios sketched out for the Euro Disney Resort would be tailor-made for the continent. After all, Europeans had a sort of cultural romanticism for Americana (hence why all six of Paris’ resort hotels were themed to regions and time periods in American history), and the draw of the Golden Age of Hollywood would doubtlessly be a hit.
The Disney-MGM Studios Europe park would open with a tremendous new take on a park’s “Main Street” – an idealized Hollywood Blvd. (based on the Floridian park) would be located entirely indoors, setting the cinematic stage for a park unlike any Disney had built before. Under perpetual darkness, the glowing neon avenue would welcome guests before they’d exit into the daylight and stand before the Chinese Theater, home to a French version of The Great Movie Ride.
Beyond, the park would come pre-built with attractions that Orlando’s Studio park would only add later – the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Movie Set Adventure, Special Effects soundstages, the Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater, Superstar Television, Animation exhibitions, and a gangster shootout high speed thrill ride that we can imagine was based on the Dick Tracy Crimestoppers dark ride once planned for Florida.
Set deep in the park’s backlot-themed land, guests would also find a studio tour. But a problem with the plan quickly emerged back in Florida, where Orlando’s “studio” park was quickly falling on hard times…
Studio sours
By the early 1990s, just as Euro Disneyland was poised to open, the fortunes of Disney-MGM Studios were souring. Most production had pulled out of the would-be studio, with only Disney’s own accessory programs being filmed on-site (such as the new Mickey Mouse Club, above). More often than not, the sets were empty. One thing was certain: Disney’s plans to transform Orlando into a “Hollywood East” had been dashed.
That might not have been so catastrophic except that Eisner had intentionally underbuilt the theme park, anticipating that the real draw – the Backstage Studio Tour – would make up for the lack of rides and attractions. The bad news is, he was wrong. With any hopes of Disney-MGM Studios being a real movie studio fading away, seeing so much as a production assistant on the backlot became an exceptional encounter, not the norm, and a walking tour of empty or underutilized soundstages didn’t inspire much confidence.
The advertised highlight of the tour quickly became the staged events, like Catastrophe Canyon. That’s why the ride earned its own in-depth entry in this disastrous series, Declassified Disasters: The Backstage Studio Tour, that traces MGM’s once-headlining ride.
And maybe that was okay. Certainly the same was true at Universal Studios Hollywood – the originator of the Tram Tour concept – where staged demonstrations, explosive encounters, and the wonder of seeing movie sets in person had become more of a draw than a chance encounter with a real hot set… But at least at Universal’s Hollywood park, you were indeed seeing real sets you might recognize from Psycho, Back to the Future, and Desperate Housewives, plus staged encounters with Jaws, King Kong, Norman Bates, an earthquake, and more.
Disney-MGM Studios, meanwhile, asked you to imagine what it might be like if any movie whose title you might recognize had ever been shot there.
By the mid-90s much of the backlot (including New York Street and Mickey Avenue) was opened to foot traffic as Disney gave up on actual production, and the park’s soundstages designed for filming were reused to house attractions like Voyage of the Little Mermaid and The Magic of Disney Animation. An abridged 25-minute version of the Studio Tour continued (amazingly) until 2014. Though it maintained the pretense of being on an actual studio for the two decades leading up to its closure, few would’ve fallen for the premise.
To keep Disney-MGM Studios from being viewed as a Disney park without much to do, Imagineers smartly stocked the park with can’t-miss E-Tickets (STAR TOURS, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, and Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster). Still, it was denounced by fans with that most ominous and foreboding label: a “half-day park.”
So right about time that EuroDisneyland opened, Disney was forced to re-think its plans for the Disney-MGM Studios Europe by bolstering the park with more to do. As “luck” would have it, none of that would matter anyway…
Cancelled
Euro Disneyland wouldn’t just be Disney’s first foothold in Europe; it would be Michael Eisner’s legacy project – the pinnacle of his ambitious, cinematic, artistic, and expensive portfolio. The Parisian resort was meant to change Disney forever… and it did. But one thing no one had imagined is that EuroDisneyland would fail.
In fact, despite warnings of overcrowding, hotels at 100% occupancy, and gridlocked roads, Disneyland Paris opened to a mild crowd. And while executives might’ve hoped that it was simply an opening day miscommunication, things stayed that way.
Blame it on the chilly reception of the French (who largely viewed EuroDisney as an invasion of American commercialism and consumer culture akin to placing a McDonald’s under the Eiffel Tower) and Eisner’s overestimation of the park’s draw. Alone, the single theme park couldn’t support seven massive hotels. Staffing was cut, new names were tested, and one of the hotels was mothballed altogether. But it was undeniable: Eisner’s big bet on lavish, expensive, oppulent theme parks had failed.
Eisner infamously returned to the LA Times with a very different outlook, suggesting that anything – including closure – was on the table for Euro Disneyland. He ominously suggested that that he wasn’t sure any private company should have expended what Disney had on the European resort.
He meant it. Like clockwork, Eisner shuttered any and all major projects happening across the company. Budgets were slashed and staffing was cut left and right. Disney’s President and Eisner’s right-hand man, Frank Wells, died unexpectedly in a plane crash in 1994, and that loss sent the already-weary Eisner over the edge. He surrounded himself in financiers and put penny-pinching accountants and retail executives in charge of the parks, exiling Imagineers from having significant say on projects.
Partway through Eisner’s fabled “Disney Decade” proclamation, he had tightened the purse strings to spend mere cents for every dollar he’d promised. Of course, this last decade of Eisner’s tenure is one defined today by closed classics, disastrous missteps, unbuilt ideas, and creatively-starved theme parks like the Declassified Disaster: Disney’s California Adventure.
And given that Paris was the problem, any plans for a Disney-MGM Studios Europe were over. Period.
But a contract is a contract. Disney was obligated to build a second theme park in Paris by a decade after the original park’s opening – 2002. Seemingly blinded by his own fears, Eisner couldn’t have realized that by giving Disneyland Paris the most pathetic Disney park ever designed, he’d only send the resort spiraling again.
Are you ready to step into the miniscule movie park Disneyland Paris got? We’ll go on a walking tour on the next page…