In 2014 – with the Ratatouille attraction as a pilot – Disney committed to a self-funded rescue plan for Disneyland Paris, pledging to invest €1 billion in the resort over the proceeding decade. The next year, the two parks of Disneyland Paris welcomed 15 million visitors. Disney was ready to go all-in on their European resort.
In early 2017, The Walt Disney Company successfully acquired Saudi Prince Alwaleed’s 9% stake in Euro Disney S.C.A. in exchange for shares of Disney proper. For the Prince’s remaining 1% of the company, the “Mouse House” offered cash. Thanks to Disney’s slow and methodical acquisition of shares in Euro Disney S.C.A. over decades, the company ended February of that year holding 85.7% of the financial company they had helped form to finance the resort thirty years earlier (when they’d intentionally held just 49% ownership). More importantly, Disney expressed its intention to buy the rest.
That buy-back was completed in June 2017, when Disney officially secured 97% of outstanding shares in Euro Disney S.C.A., technically “acquiring” the once-public company and officially de-listing it from stock exchange. As a result, Disneyland Paris became wholly-owned by the Walt Disney Company, joining Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World. (Tokyo is wholly owned by OLC, and both Hong Kong and Shanghai are majority-owned by separate legal entities backed by local and central government, respectively with Disney holding a minority position.)
With Disneyland Paris now folded into The Walt Disney Company’s ownership structure, the French resort’s priorities would change. And that meant that it was time to give Walt Disney Studios the permanent fix it had needed for decades…
Studio fatigue
For the purposes of your scorecard, it’s worth it to pause for a moment and survey all that had come to Walt Disney Studios Park in its first seventeen years. In this comparison of the park’s opening year (2002) map versus the same view from 2019, we see the addition of The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror in “Production Courtyard”; the five flat rides of “Toon Studio” (Magic Carpets, Cars, RC Racer, Slinky Dog, and Parachute Drop) as well as the area’s Crush’s Coaster. There’s the little Ratatouille hamlet.
There’s even the remains of the Studio Tram Tour – existing now as Cars Road Trip, an almost unthinkable Cars themed tram ride that exists entirely to ferry riders to Catastrophe Canyon, which is exactly the same as it ever was except that now the exploding gas truck is smiling and has eyes in its windshield. Terrifying.
Altogether, I think it gives us license to acknowledge that by any measure, seventeen years of expansion had left Walt Disney Studios as a park that was certainly better and definitely had more to do and maybe even had glimpses of quality, but was still, overall, Very Bad.
Disney Legend John Hench – a career Disney artist and practically a founding member of the Disneyland team – spoke often a particularly momentous interaction he had with Walt in the early days of Imagineering. As Walt waxed poetic on the real leather straps and historically-accurate brass fasteners affixed to Frontierland’s stage coaches, an exhausted Hench rebutted, “Walt, this is way too much detail. The guests won’t get it! You’re wasting money; you’re wasting effort.”
As Hench recalled, Walt responded, “Don’t underestimate the guest. They won’t be able to tell you necessarily why this feels good, but it’s because of all this detail! They won’t be able to point to that filigree or the fact that that’s real brass or these seats are actual leather and tell you that, but they will know the difference. They will feel it.”
Clearly, when Disney took ownership of Disneyland Paris, they inherited a disaster that they themselves had created in Walt Disney Studios Park – a place that pretty uniformly lacked the kind of quality and attention to detail that Walt had believed in (and worse, that the original park in Paris had in spades, deepening an already-clear divide).
To be sure, much of what ailed Walt Disney Studios were problems inherent in the “studio park” model and thus, found at the Disney-MGM Studios and Universal Studios Florida, too… Bruce Vaughn’s words echo: “There are moments of excitement and the final product is exciting, but the actual process isn’t as glamorous as people think.” Indeed, we want theme parks to take us somewhere – another time, another place, and as learned by way of studio parks and California Adventure, ideally somewhere better than the world we’re used to, not a condensed version of the least wondrous aspects of it.
The Walt Disney Studios of 2002 failed in that regard, “transporting” us only into the behind-the-scenes of an industry whose operation is far less captivating than its output. Even passed through a lens of “fantasy” and dialed up to an eleven, there’s little of “Disney caliber” in eating in a “commissary,” walking under lighting rigs, searching out giant marquees affixed to corrugated steel warehouses… If there were any romance to this world, it would exist in the notion that around the corner, you might see a building or a town square and think, “Holy shit, I’ve seen this in the movies! This is where they made that!” – a feeling quite impossible to have in a place where no movie would ever be filmed.
The solution had been clear: to stop trying to tease out some hidden, undiscovered warm and genius in the concept and submit that the best future for Walt Disney Studios lay outside the confines of faux movie-making. Obviously, projects like Toy Story Playland, Place de Rémy, and even the placemaking around “Production Courtyard” were proof of concept. They all existed to make the best of what the studio theme had given. It stood to reason that a critical mass of such immersive experiences could actually make the remaining studio infrastructure the exception and not the rule.
This, by the way, is the playbook that the original Disney-MGM Studios in Florida would eventually stumble upon with its own Toy Story Land, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, and Monstropolis – that instead of seeing “behind-the-scenes,” a studio park could easily use its ode to Hollywood and movie-making as a frame story that could quickly give way to stepping into the movies… A convenient discovery given that that’s the direction the entire industry of themed entertainment had pivoted.
After all, even by the time Walt Disney Studios opened in 2002, the theme park design language had already evolved away from the “studio park” aesthetic altogether. A suite of “New Millennium” parks including Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Universal Islands of Adventure, and Tokyo DisneySea had each been a sort of rebuttal to the “studio park” era; a “return to form” that basically looked sidelong at Paramount’s Kings Island and Warner Bros. Movie World and Six Flags Magic Mountain said, “Oh yeah? Let’s see you do this.”
Theme parks were mid-way through their own Renaissance when Disney defaulted to a low-cost “studio” model in Paris as a cost-saving measure.
And of course, the “immersive” ethos began within those 21st century parks would turn out to be just the first step en route to the de facto model of today: the “Living Land,” totally immersive and drawn from the screen, literally enveloping guests in the worlds of characters they know and love.
The nuclear weapon of the Content Wars as they occur on the battlefield of theme parks, these $500+ million lands laboriously bringing to life a to-scale place with absolute commitment to the bit would be The Plan going forward – with all the good and the bad that comes with Imagineering being recast as content curators rather than the source of new stories and worlds. Standalone rides would no longer do. The future was “Living Lands,” plucked from the screen and providing guests with ways to shop, dine, and live as their favorite characters had…
Place de Rémy had been a modest experiment in the genre. But now, Walt Disney Studios was poised for its “big fix.” How do you even begin in a park as fundamentally fractured and broken as Disneyland Paris’ second gate? And would it really work anyway? Well…
Reboot
In tried and true Hollywood fashion, Walt Disney Studios Park needed a reboot. 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 forums: a €2 billion reinvestment in Walt Disney Studios.
Yes, it was time for Disneyland Paris’ second gate to get the all-at-once, intentional, multi-year reimagining that had been afforded to its two spiritual sisters, California Adventure and Hong Kong Disneyland. But born into a squarely post-Potter industry (and applied to a park much more infrastructurally compromised than its sisters), the fix in France would look quite a bit different than either.
Artwork made it clear that Disney would more or less spare the existing footprint of Walt Disney Studios – the existing entry sequence of an indoor Main Street flanked by theaters; The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror in the park’s Hub (its placement now looking like quite a ham-fisted and short-term solution); with “Toon Studio” and Toy Story Playland to the right, and a series of warehouses to the left.
But in a clear “mea culpa” that they’d built themselves into a dead-end with the fundamental logistics of the existing park, Walt Disney Studios’ reboot would come by way of an expansion westward, out of the park’s existing footprint and into the previously-unused real estate beyond. There, the “Y” would be topped with an “O” – a new lagoon around which Disney would construct a number of “Living Lands”… or at least, micro-versions of them…
Early artwork suggested that this new iteration of Walt Disney Studios would effectively position lands themed to Toy Story, Frozen, Star Wars, and The Avengers around the lagoon, creating something like Disney’s movie-focused take on Islands of Adventure’s core formula. But as Walt Disney Studios’ reimagining neared its definitive end seven years later, the final result was a whole lot more (and yet, a whole lot less) than concept art suggested…
the strangest thing about this whole project to me is the fact that paris didnt attempt to fight or even redesign arendelle so they weren’t left with the worst of the three lands as its lynchpin 2 years after the others opened.
For most people who’ve visited both the consensus seems to be hong kong has the vastly better land while tokyo has the vastly better ride. Then Paris is coming along and getting hong kong’s lesser ride and half of the land it has and nothing from tokyo. I know that guests are overwhelmingly local but still youd think paris would want something unique about their arendelle but instead they seem to be basing the expansion off of half of hong kong’s land.
the whole strategy here just seems so weird
Absolutely true. Even from the earliest artwork of the park’s big expansion, people were zooming in and going, “Wait, it’s only half of Galaxy’s Edge, too?” That artwork has what would typically be the Millennium Falcon Smugglers Run half of the land, but with an X-Wing instead of the Falcon, so it was like, “Okay, so… it’ll be Black Spire Outpost, but with Rise of the Resistance?” I really do this that was their M.O. here the whole time – basically “sampler” versions of the “Living Lands” designed for other parks.
It’s not like the Sliding Sleighs ride in Hong Kong is a masterpiece, but yes, it’s totally nonsensical that Frozen Ever After – Frozen Ever After! – is what awaits at the end of the literal and metaphorical journey for this park. Even when that ride debuted at EPCOT and all the talk was about how Frozen was too new to have a permanent ride in a park (that “mindset” at Disney feels ancient now…) I said that Frozen definitely deserved a ride… it just deserved a better ride than even the best makeover of Maelstrom could produce. And now we see that ride recreated two more times by choice, which is wild… As you said, especially because Tokyo’s exists. I don’t think Disney is at all interested in paying for that (not to mention, OLC probably has a multi-year exclusivity window), but even so, it is somewhat depressing that at the end of this, Walt Disney Studios’ multi-billion-dollar makeover took seven years to result in… (checks notes) Web-Slingers, Flight Force, two flat rides, and Frozen Ever After.
yeah i can accept lesser rides (very very likely that OLC does have an exclusivity clause) but usually id prefer them to be paired with more developed lands. Like HK’s arendelle isnt winning awards for its rides but its arguably the best “land” either Disney or universal has put out in decades just because its absolutely overflowing with everything else that makes a living land
Im concerned these ‘sampler’ lands simply wont be immersive enough. Like HK’s arendelle isnt that big despite how packed it is and its twice the size with you being able to look over the harbour at more land. Pride lands is barely more than a ride with an immersive outdoor queue.
They already tried the “sample disney and if you like it go to a better disney” with original HK and it failed miserably, i hope they dont go that route again
Agreed. In my mind, it’s because the intentional strategy was to get “mini-lands” rather than full copy-pastes from elsewhere. (The early concept art seemed to be signaling that their Galaxy’s Edge would be just the “village” half, but with Rise of the Resistance instead of Smugglers Run.)
Theoretically, when this all sums up in fifty years, that would’ve created “sampler” sized” lands comprised of 1 ride, 1 restaurant, and 1 shop each, so you could cram four, five, or six of those around the lagoon whereas the more sprawling Frozen land in Hong Kong or a full sized Galaxy’s Edge would mean you could only ever amount to having two or three.
Again, I have no reason to know that was the intention, but it’s the only explanation I can come up with to explain why – to your point – they’d build all of that to conceal what’s ultimately a copy of the mediocre boat ride. I think the land itself is phenomenal, but surely even the quality-starved visitors in Paris will get off Frozen Ever After and go “Oh… that’s… that’s it?”