WALT DISNEY STUDIOS PARK: The Cinematic Story of the Box Office Bomb That Changed Disneyland Paris Forever

Walt Disney Studios

You have to give Imagineers credit – with practically no budget and no time, the task of developing a second gate for a renamed Disneyland Paris was an immense one.

Disney Imagineer Tom Morris – one of the foundational shapers of the original park at the resort – recounted in The Imagineering Story, “When we started to develop the second park for Paris, it was like, ‘It’s got to be a studio park. Make it industrial. All of the money will go inside the show, but not outside. It’s not going to be about place-making, it’s not going to be about highly-immersive environments. You’ll go into these shows and the shows will be a promotion of our films somehow. So we’ll get our film product into it. […] But all of that rockwork and stonework – Medieval and Western and Gothic and all of these things that Magic Kingdom park is all about – we don’t do that anymore.”

That made sense financially, and strategically, too. Not only had the original Disney-MGM Studios been a success, but it had also been a springboard for “studio” parks around the globe. Sure, there was Universal Studios Florida, sort of inverting MGM’s formula (with a production-focused, “backlot” stylized entrance that then expanded into camera-ready urban “lands” beyond). But more to the point, the lower-cost, behind-the-scenes, brand-forward appeal of the model had created a highly accessible one for fellow Hollywood companies.

Now that a “theme park” required only the construction of giant beige soundstages adorned in swappable movie posters, “label-slapped” IP on off-the-shelf rides, and integration with a studio’s marketing machine, was it any surprise that Paramount bought a regional chain and rebranded them as the Paramount Parks? That Warner Bros. lent its license to a series of overseas Warner Bros. Movie World parks? That MGM actually sued Disney to regain use of its own name for amusement enterprises to open its own MGM Grand Adventures park?

Now, in Walt Disney Studios Park, Imagineers would return to the formula they themselves had popularized – albeit with less time, money, and executive ambition than The Walt Disney Company had committed to any project before. The third new theme park to debut in a thirteen month window (alongside Disney California Adventure and Tokyo DisneySea), Walt Disney Studios’ “premiered” on March 16, 2002 to little fanfare and practically no coverage in the U.S. press.

The park wasn’t even acknowledged on ABC’s The Wonderful World of Disney – usually an outlet for Eisner’s self-congratulations. Which leaves you and I at the threshold of stepping into the park as it existed then…

So imagine, if you will, that it’s 2002. The glory days of Michael Eisner’s “Mouse House” sure feel far away… The Disney Renaissance is well in the past, though the direct-to-video pipeline is churning out sequels. The “100 Years of Magic” celebration has set a 122-foot-tall Sorcerer’s Hat at the end of Hollywood Blvd. at the Disney-MGM Studios. In a desperate bid to get anyone to go to Disney’s California Adventure, the park has opened “a bug’s land.”

And in celebration of Disneyland Paris’ tenth anniversary, the beleaguered European park has welcomed a baby brother. Sure, “Walt Disney Studios” is a bit premature, and maybe smaller than most (given that it’s only 30 acres compared to the 100-acre castle park next door). But if there’s one thing Eisner’s underbuilt, late-era parks got right, it’s their entries… So let’s step inside the brand new Disney theme park at Disneyland Paris…

Front Lot

Walt Disney World’s four theme parks are connected by drives along literal freeways. The original Disneyland in California just opened its own second gate – Disney’s California Adventure – where once a blacktop parking lot had been, effectively positioning the two parks’ entrances opposite each other across a plaza. To expand Tokyo Disneyland into a multi-day, multi-park resort required the most work of all: land reclamation to turn what had been the open waters of Tokyo Bay into space for a park called Tokyo DisneySea.

Compared to that, opening a second gate at the recently-rechristened Disneyland Paris was a cake walk. Disney’s European resort – designed by a contracted company specialized in master-planning communities – had already set aside the land within the resort’s ring road layout to become The Disney-MGM Studios Europe back in the ’80s. But now that it’s here, one might wonder if the space was better left as beet fields…

But hey, let’s not let the early rumors about “Walt Disney Studios Park” influence our thinking. After all, like Disney’s California Adventure, there’s no question that the first impression made by Walt Disney Studios is strong!

A grand “studio” archway and accompanying turnstile structures of wrought iron hint at art deco. Beyond them – inside the park proper – is the palm-lined Place des Frères Lumière. Nominally, this plaza is a tribute to Auguste and Louis Lumière – pioneering French filmmakers who both invented the “cinématographe” (a sort of hand-cranked film camera and projector) and who held the first public film screening in 1895. The tribute is mostly “in name only” given that the bronze fountain at the plaza’s center pays tribute to the real star of this endeavor – Mickey Mouse, here in his “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” garb.

Anyway, Place des Frères Lumière contains the requisite support facilities for a theme park – like First Aid, Lost & Found, Guest Services, etc. But our real journey into Walt Disney Studios begins beyond. There stands one of the more compelling invitations in a Disney Park: the gargantuan, art-nouveau topped soundstage of “Studio 1.” It’s flanked pleasantly and symmetrically by Studios 2 and 3 – arcing soundstages that we’ll later come to find contain live stage performances accessed from within the park proper.

The only interruption to this symmetry is the existence of the “Earffel Tower” – a 130-foot tall faux water tower topped in mouse ears. Like the smaller version at the Disney-MGM Studios in Florida (there stylized as “Earful”), the water tower is a nod to real Hollywood studios that, historically, had their own water supply to combat frequent fires that tended to spark through the combination of stage lights, flammable sets, combustable timber structures, and the infamous Santa Ana winds.

You’d be forgiven for a moment for thinking that critics have been too hard on Walt Disney Studios Park. Here, in this plaza, there’s warmth and detail. As ever, Imagineers have dialed up the saturation and intensity of color (to equalize against the perpetually grey skies of France versus the blue of California) and knowing that our path forward is through the rich, romantic, deep teal “elephant doors” of “Studio 1,” pulled aside to reveal a glass wall beyond, it’s easy to envision that this park feels like a unique offering so far!

However, as we pull back the doors of Studio 1 and pass into the soundstage’s interior, we quickly come across Walt Disney Studios’ manifestation of a common issue with these late-stage Eisner parks, this time manifested in the unique idea of an indoor “Main Street.”

Look, it was the original Disneyland that popularized the idea of a “Main Street” – basically, a gussied up commercial corridor that serves as the one way in and out of a theme park. As we said, the Disney-MGM Studios in Florida clearly found a fantastic equivalent in its Hollywood Blvd. – a streetscape that transports visitors to a 1930s Tinseltown that pays homage to reality, but feels decidedly Disney; a vibrant, neon, palm-lined world of ritzy restaurants, star-studded emporiums, converted trolley barns, and classic cars.

Like its sister, California Adventure, Walt Disney Studios can’t bring itself to actually transport guests to a long-lost time and place. Instead, “Studio 1” invites us to step into a sort of cartoonish, Day-glo daydream of what that Hollywood might’ve been like if envisioned by a production designer on a flailing B-movie moments from being shut down by the studio head. We haven’t traveled to the heyday of Hollywood; we’re on a Hollywood set… of Hollywood. Studio 1 is a boulevard of obvious and intentional flats painted to glow under effervescent blacklight.

The palms are dimensional cut-outs; the tiled roofs are plywood; the road and sidewalks are uniform, textureless concrete. the ceiling is adorned not with stars, but with studio lighting rigs and gel inserts casting a garish ’90s color palate onto this cartoon street. Here – as in California Adventure’s “Hollywood Pictures Backlot” or Hong Kong Disneyland’s Main Street – we see that the mantra was “cheap and cheerful.”

The false fronts on the right are nods to historic Hollywood locales – “Schwab’s Pharmacy!” “The Brown Derby!”) but they all lead to the same thing: a fast food eatery called Restaurant en Coulisse. Don’t let the French fool you – that’s “The Behind-the-Scenes Restaurant.” After you’ve picked up your burger and fries, you can dine at metallic patio tables under the rafters. This, we imagine, is Walt Disney Studios’ equivalent of Parc Disneyland’s table service restaurant Walt’s that occupies the second story of Main Street there. The contrast couldn’t be more stark, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of the different philosophies between these two parks.

There is no romance here; no sense of actually being in another place or time. Nope. “The time is now, and the place is here: you’re in a studio where a (highly stylized) movie set in a comical Hollywood could take place.”

The only path forward leads into the sunset, where – beneath a pink-hued mural of the Hollywood Hills – a glassed-in arch mirroring our entry portal points us out of Studio 1 and into the park proper. Since our trip through Studio 1 is bookended by the sunlit realities of France’s often chilly and wet weather, it may be that it’s wise to treat the space like a set instead of trying to pull off the impossible illusion that it’s actually a pleasant night in another time and place… but it certainly makes for an unusual follow-up to the plaza out front that seemed to suggest this park might actually take us somewhere.

Together, Place de Frères Lumière and Studio 1 form what the park calls the “Front Lot.” It’s the first area to start a naming nomenclature we’ll see at Walt Disney Studios – “Lots” instead of Parc Disneyland’s “Lands.” But it also evokes the real Hollywood term “front lot,” which typically refers to the area of the studio that contains the permanent structures, soundstages, and administrative offices. Unfortunately for us, it also happens to be the strongest of the park’s Lots – and pretty quickly, the illusion that Walt Disney Studios Park might be a blockbuster begins to fade…

“Studio 1” may have overplayed its hand a bit by leaning into the “cheap and cheerful” flatness and almost animated caricatured stylization of a glow-in-the-dark spoof Hollywood… but lighting and decor work can fix that so long as the rest of the park lives up to its potential! So as we emerge from the darkness and into Walt Disney Studios Park proper, our eyes turn forward to gaze upon the park’s central icon. Trouble is, there isn’t one. Or maybe – gulp – Studio 1 was the park’s icon?

Where we find ourselves now is quite literally the core of the park, as identified by the familiar presence of “Partners” – a copy of the sculpture of Walt and Mickey found at the Hub of Disneyland and Magic Kingdom. Walt Disney Studios Park’s offerings are a bit lopsided, but more or less existing on a Y-shaped layout. As we emerge from Studio 1, we’ve already ascended the vertical stroke of the Y. Now, a glance right and left will effectively give us sightlines through the entire remainder of the park.

To our right is “Animation Courtyard.” To our left, “Production Courtyard” and the “Backlot.” And nestled into the diagonal strokes of the Y is the park’s signature attraction, the Studio Tram Tour. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but don’t worry – a thousand mile commitment, Walt Disney Studios is not. Let’s set off…

Animation Courtyard

Ostensibly, ANIMATION COURTYARD is meant to be Walt Disney Studios’ homage to the core art form that’s powered Disney since it was founded in 1923. Walt Disney Feature Animation, as its currently known, has had its ups and downs in the 79 years since its origins on Kingswell Ave. in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. From Mickey Mouse in 1928 to the “Disney Renaissance” of the ’90s, there’s a lot to explore – up to and including the release of this year’s Lilo & Stitch – hopefully, a return to form after quite a few years of critical and commercial disasters for the studio…

Unfortunately, if you’re looking to step into the heyday of Disney Animation, or to set foot inside of any of the rich, vibrant, and verdant worlds that its animators have crafted, you’ll want to look elsewhere. Remember, Walt Disney Studios is neither interested in nor feasibly capable of immersing us in anything more than the most utilitarian of locales. And unlike the original Disney-MGM Studios, there are no actual production facilities here for us to see real animators at work.

Instead, “Animation Courtyard” is… well…

Okay, technically, Disney counts three attractions in “Animation Courtyard.”

First, there’s the Art of Disney Animation building. Beneath a cone-shaped sorcerer’s hat based on the one that tops the real Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank (in a new facility designed by renowned architect Robert A. M. Stern in 1994), this is a relatively small walkthrough-style exhibit.

It includes a brief museum gallery introducing the origins of animation, displays of character concept art and maquettes, a number of hands-on kiosks to try your hand at the digital coloring process, and an “Animation Academy” experience where guests can learn to draw Disney characters – albeit without the lead of an in-house animator like the similar exhibits at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.

Across the way, Animation Courtyard also provides access to one of those arcing soundstages we saw framing Studio 1 from outside the park. Soundstage 3 is an 1,100 seat theater that opened with Animagique – an impressive live stage show that whisked guests into glowing musical scenes from The Jungle Book, Dumbo, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King. (This musical extravaganza would ultimately last until 2016, with “Animagique” being presented more than 28,000 times in its fourteen year run.)

And finally, Animation Courtyard contained the first actual ride we’ve stumbled across so far: Flying Carpets Over Agrabah.

The good news is that one look at Flying Carpets Over Agrabah instills deserved pity for the Imagineers who surely wept over their lack of ability to really shape Walt Disney Studios. One can only feel sadness for this park that its distillation of “Disney Animation” could only be a carnival spinner. And worse, that unlike the gorgeous equivalent at Tokyo DisneySea (of pristine decoration, in a lush marble garden, surrounded in peacock fountains) or even the vaguely-participatory version at Magic Kingdom flanked in spitting golden camels, Walt Disney Studios’ manifestation of the Flying Carpets exhibits a bare minimum allowance: set before a cyclorama style flat of the Agrabah desert with only a fiberglass genie in a lifted boom chair to accentuate it.

If the Flying Carpets are Walt Disney Studios’ equivalent of Dumbo, then one makes the natural comparison to Fantasyland at the park next door – home to not just Dumbo, but four dark rides (Peter Pan’s Flight, Blache-Neige et les Sept Nains, Les Voyages de Pinocchio, and “it’s a small world”), Le Carrousel de Lancelot, Mad Hatter’s Tea Cups, Alice’s Curious Labyrinth, Le Pays des Contes de Fèes, and Casey Jr. Circus Train.

So having finally witnessed the first of only three(!) rides that call Walt Disney Studios home, let’s you and I agree here and now that the Imagineers who designed this park deserve not one iota of blame. Yes, Walt Disney Studios is surely shaping up to be a disappointment, but let’s make no mistake: no one would choose this… All we can do now is to backtrack our way to the “Hub” and tackle the other branch of the Y, hoping to find a surprising or at least relieving something there…

Read on…