EPCOT (Orlando, Florida)
Opened: October 1, 1982
Background: In a class all its own is EPCOT – the third Disney Park ever built, and the first to reside outside the “Castle Park” continuum. EPCOT was a “Hail Mary” pass by Disney’s leadership at one of the company’s darkest moments – a big, audacious project that was expensive, ambitious, and lofty in its concept. Twice the size of Magic Kingdom, the park was something very different than anything that most people associated with “Disney.” Entirely free of animated characters, the park was split into the realms of Future World and World Showcase – a permanent World’s Fair dedicated to industry and culture.
Pathways: Naturally, EPCOT did not lend itself to the “hub-and-spokes” layout, but something very different. It’s probably most accurate to call Epcot’s structure a “figure-8,” with each of the two halves circumnavigated to access the massive “pavilions” that lie around the park’s perimeter.
That broad shape is about all that’s left of EPCOT Center as it opened in 1982. Each of Future World’s pavilions was designed to feature an in-depth, informative dark ride through the history and future of its given industry. Each has disappeared (see Park Lore’s Lost Legends: Universe of Energy, Body Wars, Horizons, World of Motion, Journey into Imagination, Kitchen Kabraret, and The Living Seas entries for the full stories).
So, too, has the intentional dichotomy of Future World and World Showcase. As part of a wave of master-planned expansion from 2019 to 2023, Future World was subdivided by arbitrary delineations of convenience into Disney’s go-to (cop-out) organizing principle: loosely connected neighborhoods. Linguistically, World Celebration, World Discovery, and World Nature fundamentally mistake why World Showcase’s name works.
But even so, the park’s built-in paths do suggest that even in ’82, there was some intentionality (or at least, happy coincidence) to the “soft” sciences like oceanography, agriculture, and creativity being grouped together on one side of the park with rounded, flowing paths versus pavilions dedicated to “hard” science like energy, space, and transportation coalescing opposite, and on angular, sharp pathways.
Epcot is a work in progress, and (hopefully) always will be. While many fans aren’t quite sold on the next iteration of its design, most of the park’s paths are 1982 originals.
The “Studio” Parks
You’ll find bonus layouts of Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Studios Japan, only on our Park Paths Twitter thread!
Disney’s Hollywood Studios (Orlando, Florida)
Opened: May 1, 1989
Background: When the Disney-MGM Studios opened in 1989, only the park’s Hollywood Blvd. and Echo Lake areas were open to foot traffic. The rest of the park was accessible only via the Studios’ feature presentation: a multi-hour, tram-and-walking tour – the Declassified Disaster: The Backstage Studio Tour – stolen right out from the playbook that soon-to-be-competitors Universal Studios had intended to implement at their own Florida park, which was under construction at the same time.
But demand for the tiny park quickly exceeded supply, leading Disney to reroute the tour and open the “Streets of New York” to foot traffic. “Mickey Ave.” soon joined, repurposing backlot space for guest capacity. Especially since it quickly became apparent that real film and television production of size wasn’t ever going to come to the Disney-MGM Studios, it made sense that “back-of-house” roads soon became pedestrian paths. But clearly, the park’s purpose needed rethought with capacity and things-to-do at top of mind.
In 1994, Sunset Blvd. opened as a ready-made people-eating expansion reigned over by the Modern Marvel: The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. In true “studio” style, much of what’s happened to the park since has been the piecemeal additions of one-off E-Tickets, soundstage swaps, and IP swaps meant to keep the park stocked with can’t-miss attractions. It wasn’t until 2018 that the park make a conscious shift to cover its “studio”-style origins with a whole new logo and identity, plus two “Living Lands.”
Pathways: So explaining Hollywood Studios’ paths is… not easy. Some of its areas are “”studio cityscapes” (Hollywood Blvd., Sunset Blvd., and Grand Ave.). Some are studio-style “backlots” with no attempt to disguise soundstages or mis-matched intellectual properties (Commissary Lane, Echo Lake). Some are just absolute nonsense (the dead-end Pixar Place with no attractions, and the Animation Courtyard featuring Star Wars). Then you have two “Living Lands” – Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and Toy Story Land – that have created an outer loop around the park…
Well-meaning fans (including me!) have tried to draft out how the paths of Hollywood Studios could be fundamentally redrawn to create an easy-to-traverse loop. The truth is, Hollywood Studios is a mess of dead-ends, vestigial plazas, and operational workarounds. Changing visions for what Disney’s “studio” park should be have lead to competing expansions that never gel into one concept. Its mix of streetscape, studio lots, synergy, and Star Wars visually communicate the content clutter inside.
It’s no surprise that Disney couldn’t land on a new name for the park… Sure, it’s not a “Studio” anymore. But… what is it?
Universal Studios Florida (Orlando, Florida)
Opened: June 7, 1990
Background: Even though Universal’s original campus in Hollywood, California had been churning out films since the early 1900s (and whisking visitors through sets and special effects encounters on the tram-based Studio Tour since 1964), their California attraction was always a real, working movie studio first, and – gradually – a theme park second.
Universal Studios Florida was the company’s first chance to flip the formula, building a custom-made, master-planned theme park where guests could “Ride the Movies.” Whereas Disney’s competing “studio” park had taken Universal’s tram tour concept for their own, Universal’s park relied on big-budget, creature-feature rides – many expanded into standalone attractions after being mere tram tour vignettes in Hollywood.
Pathways: With that said, there’s not tremendous artistry to Universal Studios Florida’s layout, but it works! Guests enter through the backlot-stylized Production Central, but the rest of the park’s areas take the shape of cities – New York, San Francisco, Hollywood, London, and Springfield from The Simpsons – largely positioned around a central lagoon that serves as a visual break from urban cross streets.
Altogether, there have been relatively few changes to the park’s paths in the last 30 years since IPs can merely be swapped into soundstages (hence how the spaces built for the Lost Legends: Kongfrontation, Jaws, T2-3D, and Back to the Future: The Ride now host The Mummy, Harry Potter, Bourne, and The Simpsons with little impact on the park’s core shape). In that way, Universal Studios Florida has also proven to be a better “flex-space” than Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and still reads as a consistent whole even with nearly every single one of its Opening Day Originals closed.
Disney Adventure World (Marne-le-Vallée, France)
Opened: March 16, 2002 / March 29, 2026
Background: When Disneyland Paris’ second gate opened in 2002, it was as “Walt Disney Studios Park.” Compared to the opulance, romance, detail, and European flair of the resort’s iconic Castle Park, Walt Disney Studios was… well… it could generously be described as three concrete plazas and three total rides. Literally. In fact, we dedicated a full Declassified Disasters: Walt Disney Studios feature to the box office bomb of a park… and its haphazard turnaround.
Decades of piecemeal additions and one-off quick fixes were meant to pull Walt Disney Studios back from the brink, but even twenty years later, none of it added up to a park that was worth traveling to. A multi-billion dollar reimagining initiated with great fanfare in 2019 looked on paper like it might be the kind of substantial restart the park needed. (You can see the park’s paths as of that time here.)
Ultimately, that reimagining crescendoed in March 2026. That’s when its would-be anchor (a copy of Hong Kong Disneyland’s The World of Frozen) tipped the park enough over the threshold between “old” and “new” to warrant the roll-out of a new identity. A “studio” no more, the park became Disney Adventure World – a sort of generic, Disney+-minded rebrand meant to encapsulate that this would be Paris’ park of multiversal, brand-forward, IP-centered lands copied-and-pasted from elsewhere, eventually accumulating into a park of Disney + Pixar + Star Wars + Marvel. Did it all come together? Well…
Pathways: As you can see, Disney Adventure World’s pathways reveal fairly clearly what even the most Disney-naive visitor could recognize: despite its 2026 “opening,” this is not a new park at all. Disney Adventure World is a Frankenstein-style creation trying to make sense of the nonsensical. (The park’s Landline reinforces this.) The park has kept its studio-style introduction (now called World Premiere Plaza), then converted most of the space left of it into an Avengers Campus, and sort of messily connected happenstance Toy Story, Ratatouille, and cartoon mini-lands to the right into the mismatched Worlds of Pixar.
Most of the park’s genuinely new acreage exists via a new organizing principle: a circular lagoon that’s sort of positioned as a new hub for the expanding park, clearly meant to eventually be surrounded by immersive “Living Lands.” Right now, the World of Frozen is the only spur off of the “Adventure Way” waterfront, but it’ll soon be joined by at least a land themed to The Lion King, and eventually no doubt more copy-paste mini-lands in the future.
The point is that no matter how much Disney Imagineers do to mask the past, this park’s pathways betray the truth: Disney Adventure World is still a very strange, makeshift place.
I come back to this post constantly and marvel at just how much you can discern from the design of the paths of the parks. It’s amazing to look at each of the parks and I like to imagine the expansions done to my favourite parks (the connection of arendelle to Toy Story land in HK making a full second loop will be interesting to look at and I can’t wait to see what WDS looks like when its expansion paths are done)