The process of reimagining Walt Disney Studios (to the extent you might agree that that happened) sprawled across seven years. From piecemeal edits, refinements, and placemaking improvements to the opening of new lands, there’s no question that the final park is different and inarguably better than either the one that opened in 2002 or that existed in, say, 2019, before the formal “reimagining” began.
But rather than trudging through year-by-year adjustments, let’s do what we did in our examination of California Adventure and tackle a look at the park post reimagining. Because at the conclusion of the work begun with Iger’s announcement in 2019, Walt Disney Studios Park did indeed receive a hard reboot in 2019… so hard, in fact, that the park wasn’t even called Walt Disney Studios anymore.
Disney Adventure World
On April 12, 2024, Disney announced that Walt Disney Studios’ ongoing evolution would culminate about two years later, not just in a Frozen themed land, but in a whole new name and identity for the park. Allusions to filmmaking, studios, camera dollies, and even Mickey Mouse would be washed away from public perception, to be replaced by a campaign blending deep sunset reds, golds, blues, and violets, and imagery of a Technicolor compasses, and promises of stepping into the worlds of Disney’s leading intellectual properties.
It could only be Disney Adventure World – a name officially applied alongside the opening of its keystone project, The World of Frozen, on March 29, 2026.
This, in a sense, is the ultimate crescendo of the “Living Land” era, and of Iger’s thirst for IP. As its perfectly meaningless and endlessly flexible name implies, Disney Adventure World would speak aloud that which Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Orlando (and to some extent, Disney California Adventure in Anaheim) were too anxious to acknowledge: that when it comes to what we might call a “capital-T Theme” – a big, centering idea, a message, or a bar to entry – these parks don’t really mean anything.
Disney Adventure World is a concise distillation of the Disney+ Parks mentality; an embodiment of modern Disney’s notion that the highest calling for its theme parks is to be “a global hub where Disney stories, characters, and franchises come to life.” Full stop. The “bar to entry” is merely that another resort underwrote the research & development costs to the extent that Paris can “copy and paste” existing Living Lands into ready-made slots around its lagoon. The expansion pads reserved could just as easily be filled with Shanghai’s Zootopia as Florida’s Pandora or as California’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.
Frankly, it’s exactly the park modern corporate Disney would probably design if they were given total freedom and a blank canvas upon which to build, which – thanks to Walt Disney Studios’ minuscule footprint and lack of preciousness – they kind of have!
To get the lay of the land for a moment, the new Disney Adventure World has done some key reframing to try to bring coherence to its reverse-engineered and happenstance-shaped layout… Among them appears to be the notion that this park has neither ‘lands nor Lots, but Worlds. Of course, to make it so takes some… creativity in the form of shoehorning the word “World” or “Adventure” into every one of the park’s regions. (Spoiler alert: Disney Adventure World (singular) contains Worlds (plural) within it, including some worlds that are themselves Worlds (plural), and don’t forget Adventure World’s world, Adventure Way, which encircles Adventure Bay.)
But never mind all that for a moment. The only way to understand Disney Adventure World is to step inside, so let’s examine how (or maybe, whether) Walt Disney Studios Park was reborn as something new…
World Premiere
The adventure begins in the newly-redesignated WORLD PREMIERE. The old “Front Lot” spent little time or effort convincing us that we were in any time but now, or any place but in a modern theme park’s studio-stylized set dressing of Hollywood.
Now, once the doors of the former “Studio 1” are peeled back, the park makes a new self-introduction. World Premiere invites us to a celebratory evening under the stars as we prepare for the red carpet debut of a film. There’s not a sense that we’re “back in time,” per se, but we certainly are “somewhere else.” Doing its best impression of Florida’s Hollywood Blvd. and California’s Buena Vista Street, World Premiere whisks us away to a starlit night. The bank of retail spaces on the left have been reclad in historic Hollywood accoutrement while the quick service restaurant on the right has has its false fronts peeled away, creating an “open air” Hollywood Gardens Restaurant – still quick service, but at least steeped in some romance and wonder.
The indoor World Premiere terminates in guests passing under a marquee for the “Disney Theater,” which is a little on the nose and awkward given that they’re exiting into sunlight… but on the other end, Imagineers have created a nice portal sequence that forces guests to either side through a theater-like lobby (to help cut down on light bleed) which also serves to “contract” before the “expansion” of stepping into the space beyond.
That space, by the way, is now considered World Premiere Plaza – what was formerly Production Central. The placeholder name before the Disney Adventure World rebrand called the space the “Theater District,” which is a pleasantly romantic way of looking at it. After all, here you have these three signature soundstage buildings – two of which contain stage shows, plus the Art of Disney Animation exhibit and the lingering Twilight Zone Tower of Terror (reimagined with new show sequences that are a world away from the eerie Rod Serling mythology of yesteryear), effectively giving us one final ode to Hollywood before we leap out of this aesthetic and into the worlds beyond.
In the old Walt Disney Studios, our paths forward here would split into that “Y” layout, with only the Studio Tram Tour’s entrance dead ahead from the trajectory through World Premiere. Those options left and right still exist, but so does a genuine path forward. We’ll get to that in a moment. For now, it’s notable that the Flying Carpets Over Agrabah has also been ceded to World Premiere since it wouldn’t quite fit in the next land cobbled together from the rest of its animated brethren…
Worlds of Pixar
Now, the path to the right (once into “Animation Courtyard,” then “Toon Studio”) has been beautified with trees and ephemera but otherwise retains its past self. Actually, what’s happened here on this right side of the park is more or less a change in name only.
Through a bit of happenstance, the existing Toon Studio minus the Magic Carpets (i.e. Crush’s Coaster and Cars Quatre Roues Rallye), Toy Story Playland (Toy Soldier Parachute Drop, Slinky Dog Zigzag Spin, and RC Racer), the studio-tour-turned Cars Road Trip, and Place de Rémy (home to Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy) have been combined into a new “world” called WORLDS OF PIXAR.
Never mind that these spaces have vastly different aesthetics, immersiveness, and quality. (That sequesters seven of the park’s rides into this “world,” but as ever, all but two are fairly simple “off-the-shelf” flat rides.) Given that almost all investment in the park between 2002 and 2019 occurred on this side of the park, it’s maybe fair that Disney Adventure World merely combined and recontextualized it all rather than starting from scratch.
Marvel Avengers Campus
If we’d opted to travel left from the hub rather than right, we’d have stepped into the space formerly home to the park’s Backlot. To be sure, the entire thing has been reskinned so that no memory of the industrial blacktop expanse remains. Okay sure, MARVEL AVENGERS CAMPUS is still a fundamentally concrete, industrial, metallic space… but now it’s at least stylized enough to make itself feel intentional!
Paris’ Avengers Campus isn’t an exact clone of the version that opened at Disney California Adventure a year earlier, but a “sister.” In fact, the two co-exist in the lore of the “Marvel Theme Park Universe” – the sort of pocket dimension of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” that Disney’s superhero attractions in California, France, and Hong Kong canonically exist within. The story of Avengers Campus is that Tony Stark – the one and only Iron Man – has contributed both his own vast fortune and the old auto manufacturing facilities of his industrialist father toward the aim of recruiting the next generation of superheroes – you and me.
So the “industrial” look is now on purpose, as we visit the remains of an old Stark Motors plant, now grafted with glass and steel. This is a place where heroes convene, where whiz kids invent, and where we can train on the technologies that’ll define and defend the future.
The land shares one ride in common with California’s Campus – Spider-Man WEB Adventure, a gesture-based ride-through game that sees recruits rescue the Campus from rogue, self-replicating Spider-Bots. Also like in California, one existing E-Ticket was reskinned to anchor the campus. In France’s case, it’s not the Tower of Terror (even though it stands perilously close to the Campus…).
Instead, Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster became Avengers Assemble: Flight Force. Rather than the music of Aerosmith, the ride launches guests into space for a cosmic rescue mission alongside Iron Man and Captain Marvel. It’s perhap s a bit of an uneven ride (then-CEO Bob Chapek rode it at the land’s opening and allegedly quietly told coworkers it was not very good, prompting a Phase II effort). But it does have the unique position of featuring (ready for this?) the first Audio-Animatronic in the park’s history – the Iron Man who orients visitors in the queue. (Even Disneyland in California got its first Audio-Animatronics just eight years into existence given that that’s the year Disney invented them.)
Otherwise, Marvel Avengers Campus uses the same world-building as in Anaheim (and the lucky remains of the former Blockbuster Café) to offer a Stark Factory quick-service eatery and the Pym Kitchen buffet, plus the requisite hero greeting space, Hero Training Center.
But now we can get to the real heart of Disney Adventure World… If we retreat once more to the park’s hub, a new path has opened into the park’s future, and we can be among the first to see it…
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?”