What’s next?
To compare Walt Disney Studios’ Opening Day lineup to its map today is to see a park “plussed” by new rides and attractions and with more “stuff”… albeit, remaining surprisingly vacant. In our Ride-Count Countdown, we contend that though Walt Disney Studios technically has many rides as Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida, it has practically no E-Tickets, with most of its lineup relegated to “cheap and cheerful” filler.
Few would suggest that the park’s two-decades of piecemeal additions have served as much more than “Band-Aids,” each a one-off lure meant to draw attendance without actually fixing the park as a whole. Though the Ratatouille-themed mini-land offered a taste of what the future could hold for the park, it remains a copy-and-paste catch-all of experiences that lack a cohesive identity… There was no doubt about it: Walt Disney Studios needed the kind of fundamental redesign as Disney California Adventure.
On February 27, 2019, in a meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced what had once been a dream relegated to Disney Parks message boards and armchair Imagineering: a €2 billion reinvestment in Walt Disney Studios, doubling its existing footprint by way of three new IP-focused mini-lands largely centered around a new World-Showcase-esque mini-lagoon.
Naturally, in prominent twelve-o’clock position on the lagoon will stand Arendelle: The World of Frozen, reportedly cloning Epcot’s Modern Marvel: Frozen Ever After as its anchor; a third Frozen Ever After and a second Frozen mini-land after the one launching at Hong Kong Disneyland in 2022.
Nearby is clearly a version of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. That said, it’s expected that the Parisian version will feature only half of the land’s footprint, including just one of the two attractions included at both Disneyland and Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
Meanwhile, the park’s most embarassing remnant from opening – the vacant Backlot section – is undergoing a transformation into a French version of the Avengers Campus that took shape at Disney California Adventure in 2021. Like Anaheim, Paris’ version will include a copy of WEB-SLINGERS: A Spider-Man Adventure. As for California Adventure’s other Marvel projects – the Guardians of the Galaxy overlay of Tower of Terror or the eventual-E-Ticket Avengers anchor – neither is on the docket in Paris.
Instead, the park’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster is in the midst of a laborious 3-year transformation, all to overlay an Iron Man aesthetic onto the existing ride.
So is Walt Disney Studios getting the California Adventure-sized redesign fans longed for? Ehh… Look, the lavish concept art Disney prepared in 2019 paints a picture of a Parisian studio at last given the box office boost it’s needed. However, it’s important to keep expectations firmly grounded. At best, Disney’s promise for the park amounts to:
- three edited-down mini-versions of IP lands plucked from other parks (Avengers from California; Frozen from Hong Kong; Star Wars from Florida);
- three clones of mid-tier rides that’ll be nearly a decade old by time they actually open in Paris (Web-Slingers, Frozen Ever After, and – at worst – Milennium Falcon: Smugglers Run);
- an Iron Man redux of Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster;
- a few capacity-focused “cheap and cheerful” offerings, like a copy of Alien Swirling Saucers in Toy Story Land and the umpteenth redesign of the park’s laughably bad Tram Tour, now senselessly overlaid with Cars
Is that a California Adventure sized reimagining? Not quite. Instead, it’s a bare-minimum sprint to stay alive. And even if new “stuff” does help Walt Disney Studios to capture a better share of Disneyland Paris’ guests or extend hotel stays, we’d hestitate to call the park’s fix a “rebirth” at all. Unlike California Adventure’s foundational rewiring, Walt Disney Studios will still be a deeply flawed park mixing moments of character catch-alls, IP immersion, and faltering studio style with no clear identity to continue building off of.
Redesigned and reimagined
There’s no doubt that when Walt Disney Studios emerges from its decade-long reimagining in the late 2020s, it’ll help Disneyland Paris’ second gate “hold its own” in attendance. Hopefully, that will last permit reinvestment in the resort’s castle park itself, ending the period of suspended animation that’s been its calling card since 1995. Walt Disney Studios will be bigger; it’ll be brighter; it’ll be better. But it won’t be finished.
Quite the contrary, Walt Disney Studios in 2027 will probably have about the size, quality, and ride-count it should’ve had in 2002. So despite its growth spurt, the park will be far from “caught-up.” It’ll still be behind. All we can hope is that Disney quickly fills in the many expansion pads that’ll exist around that lagoon (ideally, with at least one or two wholly original ideas) and that their big bet on mini-lands pays off.
Interestingly, Walt Disney Studios may end up being Disney’s prototype for an “IP Park,” borrowing from the formula created by Universal’s Islands of Adventure (and long dreamed of as the third gate at Disneyland in California). When all is said and done, its “ret-conned” layout will include a Hollywood-themed set of entry lands, dispensing into IP-focused mini-lands (more or less) situated around a loon – Avengers, Star Wars, Frozen, Toy Story, and Ratatouille.
If all goes according to plan, the park will be fully reintroduced in the late-2020s… In so doing, the last of Eisner’s underbuilt and creatively-starved parks will finally at least be on the road to success… even if we’d argue it’ll be far from finished.
For now, Walt Disney Studios Park remains one of the oddest in Disney’s catalogue – and by most any metric, almost certainly still “the worst.” For fans of Imagineering, it’s a master class in what can go wrong. Out-of-date, out-of-touch, creatively starved, and financially frozen, there was practically no way Walt Disney Studios could’ve been anything but a box office bomb.
After decades of dragging down Disneyland Paris, a bit of hope may be on the horizon… and though we doubt that an overdue expansion alone will finally turn Disney’s “worst theme park ever” into a blockbuster, at least the beginning of a multi-decade redemption story has been written…
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So that’s what we want to know from you – do the plans for Walt Disney Studios go far enough? When it comes out of the other side of this California-Adventure-level reconfiguration, will it be stronger for it? What long-term changes could stop Walt Disney Studios from becoming another catchall IP park explained away as a movie studio?