Stories Untold: An Armchair-Imagineered Build-Out Reimagining of Disney Adventure World at Disneyland Paris

Starting Point

When the maiden of Romeo and Juliet laments that her family name alone prevents the star-crossed Romeo from being hers, she famously waxes, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet!”

The opposite, arguably, is true as well. Because even after the official “re-opening” of “Disney Adventure World” on March 29, 2026, it’s fairly clear that Paris’s beleaguered second gate isn’t fixed or solved. If you took someone who had never heard of Disneyland Paris at all and gave them a ticket to the “Grand Opening” of Disney Adventure World, it’s likely that even among the pomp and circumstance, they’d easily identify that this is not a “from-scratch,” “new” theme park. Even a layman could identify that no one would choose to build a park this way if they could start fresh.

But it’s important for our purposes today that we understand the realities we have to work with. So in terms of some broad strokes reframing: the tediously cartoonish “Studio 1” indoor Main Street and the barren “Production Courtyard” beyond containing Tower of Terror gained trees and a more romantic, old Hollywood vibe, becoming World Premiere Plaza. The once-horrendous Backlot became the equally-industrial-but-at-least-stylized Avengers Campus, which is certainly… better? The micro-lands themed to Toy Story, Ratatouille, and part of the vestigial Toon Studio were conglomerated into Worlds of Pixar. So the “old” Walt Disney Studios is now entirely accounted for through those three reverse-engineered lands.

As for the new part of the park, built on previously-unused real estate: it centers on a new lagoon, “Adventure Bay,” accessed via Adventure Way – an art nouveau street connecting the old park to a lagoon-encircling pleasure gardens with a Tangled-stylized teacup ride and a set of yoyo swings nominally tied to Pixar’s Up. And so, with World of Frozen and a Lion King land on the way, we see the “master-plan” for Walt Disney Studios unfold.

Of course, placemaking and eateries and name changes aside, the cynical analysis would be that the much-touted €2 billion redo sort of embarrassingly nets to a copy of Frozen Ever After from EPCOT, a copy of Web-Slingers from California Adventure, and a handful of accessory flat rides. In short, Disney Adventure World is still a fundamentally broken park to the extent that even after it’s relaunch, it’s pretty agreeably still the worst Disney theme park on Earth by a substantial margin, which is… “not great, Bob.”

And that is important for us, because ultimately this very flawed park – the Adventure World of 2026 – will be the jumping off point for our Build-Out. If you’ve read my other Build-Outs, you’ll recognize why… With these projects, I try very hard to be “reasonable.”

Now listen, when we get to the end of this walk-through, you’ll be looking at a park infused with tens of billions of dollars of capital that would take decades to build, ultimately designed by a layperson with no real skills, no skin in the game, and no corporate mandates. So “realistic” is off the table. But “reasonable” isn’t! I want to actually work with what we’ve got – the good, bad, and ugly. I want to do what real designers do, salvaging ride systems, restaurants, restrooms, and retail; I want to consider backstage access, and capacity, and use real ride models by real manufacturers.

That’s really hard to do for “Disney Adventure World” because through inheritance or short-sightedness, so much of this park is really unappealing or poorly planned. Among the most troublesome features:

1. THE ENTRANCE: First you have those great big central soundstages that serve as the park’s Main Street and flanking theaters. They’re not bad infrastructure at all, but they are limiting. It’s really no wonder that the default consideration here is that the park must have “Hollywood” as it its introduction unless you’re willing to pull down these three huge buildings or find some clever-but-expensive way of concealing them… They are hugely inflexible limiting factors.

2. TOWER OF TERROR: The next big issue to “deal with” is The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. The problem there is that if it retains its theme, then this whole area right inside the park is effectively “locked” onto Hollywood. But even if you do decide you’ll re-theme it, you still have to contend with its location: plopped down, off-center, in the park’s hub since 2007. That’s part of a recurring motif with this park where every decision ever made appears to have been made for exactly its own immediate benefit with zero long-term strategy or planning. So now we have a physically and gravitationally huge E-Ticket thrill ride that needs considered thematically and logistically.

3. THE LAYOUT: Next, you have to address the park’s Franken-layout, whose discordance is much more obvious in my hand-drawn, to-scale layout above than in the stylized versions Disney shares. Even after decades of ad-hoc, piecemeal, short-sighted tweaks, you can still see that “Y-shaped” layout that’s been teased into what it is today, messily sequestering Pixar to the right and Marvel to the left. So limiting was this basic framework that you can see why Imagineers’ real-world solution was to basically build a midway extending out of the ugliness of the “old” half of the park and to something entirely new, discordant as it may be narratively and stylistically… Speaking of which…

4. THE “NEW” INFRASTRUCTURE: The new “Adventure Bay” lagoon pulls the park’s center of gravity well past its previous footprint. Obviously, Disney’s plan is to continue filling slots around that lagoon until it creates a sort of mini-World-Showcase where the Worlds being Showcased are IP-fueled “Living Lands.” If that had been the pursuit back in 2002, designers would obviously have pulled the lagoon down to the place it clearly should be, so that you exit out of “World Premiere” and onto its shores. But alas, that’s no longer “reasonable,” so we’ll have to deal with the lagoon’s real-world positioning, deep in the park. And then…

5. THE WORLD OF FROZEN: For better or worse, The World of Frozen is taking its dutiful spot at the twelve o’clock position around the lagoon, figuratively and literally serving as a new icon and centerpiece for the park. Right now, it seems downright silly that this whole lagoon exists to serve The World of Frozen, which is almost comically far from… well… anything else. Obviously that’ll change as slots fill in, but for now, The World of Frozen is certainly an oddity that we might wish we could relocate or even erase altogether to align with a bigger “Blue Sky” idea for the park.

What these five elements leave for an armchair Imagineer are forks in the road: either be reasonable by working with each of the problematic aspects above and trying to reengineer them into coherence, or…. don’t. But here’s the issue: if we choose to merely erase away even one of these foundational components, we’re essentially not working on a “reasonable” Build-Out anymore, but a fantasy so diverged from what’s practical for the real park that you ought not feel constrained by any limitations at all. If you say, “Well, let’s just pretend there was no Adventure Bay,” then why bother keeping any of the other four hurdles? Just start over with a blank canvas, right?

Both approaches can be fun! S.W. Wilson of Ideal Build-Out, who I very much admire, has gone both routes in two separate designs – one a Hollywood-style Franken-park improving on what Disney Adventure World will be, and a separate, far-flung, from-scratch Animal Kingdom-style concept park that would require that Walt Disney Studios never existed.

For me personally as an “armchair Imagineer,” I’m more interested in working with what we’ve got. I like the problem solving it takes to work around existing infrastructure and the “a-ha” moments of how things can be re-used. Those are little victories! So right here and now, I can commit to working with the five problematic elements above (again, Entrance, Tower of Terror, the layout, the Adventure Bay infrastructure, and the position of The World of Frozen). But how will we re-use them?

Drafting desk

So now at last, let’s dig into the unavoidable conversation here – Theme with a capital t. It’s sort of an old-school idea to suppose that a theme park can have one! But there is tremendous power in a “big idea”; A “reason for being”; in the audacity to be about something, and then to stick to it even if it means your park can’t house that hot new IP! Obviously, we see vestiges of the idea of Theme across Disney Parks, but in a world where Frozen can be found at EPCOT, Cars in Magic Kingdom, Star Wars at Disneyland, and Avatar at California Adventure, it’s clear that if a “bar to entry” exists at any of them, it’s… low.

As we’ve already discussed, “Disney Adventure World” sort of proudly declares itself as free from the limitations implied by Theme altogether. It inherits the already-flimsy themes implied by the catch-all “studio park” it was born as (“Ride the movies!” “Live the adventure!”) and then gets even less focused. Disney Adventure World has no larger “message” or “big idea” – even about movies! If a theme could be derived, it would maybe be that The Walt Disney Company is an entertainment powerhouse whose collection of owned and acquired intellectual property is second-to-none and that immersive theme park lands are the final frontier of any franchise worth its weight.

So when I say that I started and abandoned this build-out many times, you can imagine why.

The first and most obvious path is just to follow Disney Adventure World to its logical conclusion, taking the layout I drew above and doing what Disney is actually going to do – just keep filling in the slots around the lagoon with whatever, and maybe build out the existing spaces here and there, too. It’s kind of a dispiriting endeavor though… How toothless is it to say, “Here’s an idea: let’s make this a showcase of Disney + Pixar + Marvel + Star Wars + Avatar! Movies!!”

Sure, that’s almost certainly this park’s real life fate as Disney Adventure World… But that’s exactly the point. Part of the problem with a theme-less theme park is that who really cares whether it’s Monstropolis or Zootopia or Motunui or Pandora that comes next? There’s not even any art to deciding what goes where. Just keep filling slots as franchises prove worth the investment! And even once the park is geographically full, we wouldn’t have actually fixed anything but the ride count. There’d be no cleverness displayed; no revelation of the untapped potential here; just the kind of peripheral work that would reinforce the park’s Themelessness (new word alert!).

So for “Draft 2,” I tried to at least provide some bigger picture organizing principle. The breakthrough here (which, spoiler alert, didn’t survive into my final plan) was that maybe we could take the “Studio 1” / “World Premiere” enclosed Main Street and turn it into…

… the actual Walt Disney Studios from the 1940s. When we step into that big central soundstage at the park’s entrance (which Studio 1’s architecture was clearly derived from in part), we’d find ourselves not in a faux outdoor Hollywood street, but inside the studio – duh! We can dine at the Animators’ Commissary; drink in the Screening Room Bar; shop in the Ink & Paint Department. And more importantly, we at least elevate the whole “movies!!” theme into something more, sort of insinuating that all the worlds to follow – Pixar, Marvel, Frozen, and whatever else we add – share this common origin story: of the artists hard at work back in the ’40s.

The problem is, that’s a lie. If we maintain our grounded assumption this park will be the requisite showcase of Disney + Pixar + Marvel + Star Wars + Avatar, then it’s not really true that its contents share that origin story, right? The Marvel Cinematic Universe began with Paramount, with Disney benefitting from a well-timed purchase. Likewise, it was 20th Century Fox who had the smarts to greenlight likely park inhabitants STAR WARS and Avatar, both of which Disney bought later. Disney distributed Toy Story, but had little faith in the early output of Pixar. So I did not continue down this path for long.

But that idea did get me thinking about something I liked a lot: using this park as a timeline of Disney’s eras. If we sort of roughly envision this park as Disney’s answer to Islands of Adventure, it could be clever to imagine that we begin at a Walt Disney Studios of the 1940s, then emerge to look across a lagoon at Frozen in the 12 o’clock position. Ergo as we circumnavigate the park, we are literally walking the timeline from Mickey Mouse to Frozen – stepping into worlds drawn from classic films of the Golden Age (’40s), then the Silver Age (’50s and ’60s), the Bronze Age (’70s and ’80s), then the Disney Renaissance of the ’90s. Frozen – still in its locked-in position – serves as our embodiment of the Disney Revival (2010s), then we could fill all the spaces after Frozen either with…

• Star Wars, Avatar, and Marvel, making our timeline an examination of The Walt Disney Company’s story, or
• say, Moana, Onward, and Luca, zeroing this park in on animation, which I like better because the narrower focus feels a little more invigorating in a Build-Out sense and a little more like it has something to say in a Thematic sense

A version of this timeline idea actually will persist into my final Build-Out. But I still had a little bit of a struggle with this still being a “movie park.” Even if the timeline gives us something resembling a Theme, we haven’t really disguised that this is still Disney Adventure World; still Disney + Pixar + Marvel + Star Wars. I still don’t like it. It’s still not enough to excite me and push me onward through a Build-Out…

Theme with a capital T

“Step into the movies!”

“Live the adventure!”

“Explore incredible worlds!”

“Here’s a bunch of places you’ve seen in high earning Disney + Pixar + Marvel + Star Wars + Avatar franchises, each distilled down to 1 ride, 1 restaurant, and 1 store, and conveniently set down next to one another in whatever order their Disney+ viewership metrics, sequel box office performance, and / or success as theme park lands at other resorts allowed us to paste them here!”

Is it possible for “Walt Disney Studios Park” or “Disney Adventure World” to be more? I mean, really…? Is it possible to take…

• the good, bad, and ugly we inherit from Walt Disney Studios (the enclosed main street and theaters, and an adoration of the movies, and Tower of Terror), plus…
• that which we get from the “Adventure World” mentality (the idea of a lagoon surrounded in “Living Lands” based on Disney + Pixar + Marvel + Star Wars, with a locked in World of Frozen that isn’t going anywhere), plus…
• the hopes and ideas we drafted along the way (the idea of the park narrowing its focus either through a framing device, a timeline, or exclusion criteria for IP, creating a park that at least begins to have a Theme)…

…. and actually force ourselves to wade through the obvious…? What if we took all these ingredients and a sense of “reasonableness” and refused to allow this park to be about Hollywood and “movies” at all? This park needs a bar to entry; a “raison d’être;” a capital-t Theme. So what if instead of falling back on the obvious, we could find a new angle to make sense of what we’ve got…?

After many, many drafts and abandonments, I stumbled on a slight adjustment that brought it all together for me… And on the next page, we’ll start our walk through this reimagined park – including a new name.