10. Shanghai Disneyland
Ride Count: 18
Disney’s sixth Disneyland-style park opened in 2016. Unlike its sisters, though, the mainland Chinese park ignored then rewrote the “rules” of Disney’s “Castle Parks.” Unbelievably, Shanghai Disneyland did away with tropes like Adventureland, Frontierland, and Main Street entirely, shuffled the park’s tried-and-true layout, and dispensed with nearly all expected, standard “Castle Park” rides in favor of new-age technological anchors.
So even if the park only opened with 13 rides, it’s worth noting that each was unique, if not in concept than in execution. A stylistically-boosted, multimedia Buzz Lightyear Planet Rescue, an epic-sized Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for Sunken Treasure, and the long-rumored Soaring Over the Horizon all premiered at the park. Space Mountain was entirely replaced with the Modern Marvel: TRON Lightcycle Power Run; the enormous Storybook Castle became home to a dark ride called Voyage to the Crystal Grotto, and the Adventureland replacement features a white water rapids ride through the towering Mount Apu Taku rather than a Jungle Cruise.
2018’s Toy Story Land – the park’s first expansion – added a net three rides to Shanghai’s count (but, like all Toy Story Lands, the rides are “cheap and cheerful,” adding simple family flat ride capacity rather than anything revolutionary or headlining).
Instead, it was 2023’s Zootopia that served as the park’s real indicator of its continued growth… and its continued divergence from the high bar of timelessness that usually governs “Castle Parks.” The first theme park build centered on the 2016 animated film (which performed exceptionally well in China) includes just one ride – the E-Ticket trackless Zootopia: Hot Pursuit – but shows that Disney’s investment in the park won’t necessarily cool just because the company’s larger relationship with China has. It also means that though Shanghai Disneyland still contains the fewest rides of any “Castle Park,” it has an impressively high ratio of E-Tickets.
What’s next? Leaked construction permits in early 2024 suggested that Shanghai Disneyland was looking to add a substantial roller coaster to its lineup, wedged on a small expansion pad between Zootopia and the park’s Fantasyland. Rumors suggested that the ride would be themed to Spider-Man, serving as a first Marvel attraction for the Chinese park. That rumor was confirmed at the 2024 D23 Expo.
Thanks to the leaked plans and new official confirmations, we know quite a lot about the ride, which is likely to launch guests into a family-friendly race around a W.E.B. engineering complex as Spider-Man helps guests escape from a “something goes horribly wrong” experiment. We don’t yet know when official construction will begin or when the ride will open, but when it does, it’ll continue Shanghai’s streak of one-of-a-kind rides.
9. Universal Islands of Adventure
Ride Count: 18
In 1999, Universal’s gutsy attempt to take on Disney produced Universal’s Islands of Adventure, a mythic park dispensing entirely with “behind-the-scenes” and movies in favor of timeless, literary stories from the worlds of Dr. Seuss, Marvel comics, Jay Ward’s Sunday funnies, Jurassic Park, and ancient myths and legends. It offered a world class collection of new-age thrills, from the Incredible Hulk Coaster to Jurassic Park River Adventure, Cat in the Hat, Dudley Do-Right’s Ripsaw Falls, and the king of all Modern Marvels: The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man.
Naturally, the opening of the original Wizarding World of Harry Potter (featuring Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, Flight of the Hippogriff, and a repurposed Dragon Challenge) in 2010 really put the park on most vacationers’ maps. In 2016, the park opened the would-be follow-up to next door Universal Studios’ Lost Legend: Kongfrontation, and while Skull Island: Reign of Kong may have been met with lukewarm reception, at least it showed Comcast’s continued commitment to investing big in the resort.
In 2017, Universal shocked fans with the announcement that the two intertwined B&M coasters of Dragon Challenge would close, making way for 2019’s Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure – a headlining family coaster of spectacular scale and detail. The very next year, the astonishing Jurassic World VelociCoaster arrived, changing the park’s skyline forever. The two rides together net to no-change in the ride count after the loss of Dragon Challenge, but frankly, the one-two punch of Hagrid’s and VelociCoaster make Islands of Adventure a world class thrill destination like never before.
What’s next? There are at least at few other place in the park we hope we’ll see movement someday, to say nothing of our dreamy, Blue Sky build-out of the park… Right now, though, there are only light rumors of what the future might hold for Islands of Adventure. Our friends at Park Stop have a strong feeling that The Legend of Zelda is en route to replace the park’s Lost Continent (a land whose last attraction – the Lost Legend: Poseidon’s Fury – closed in 2023)…
8. Disney California Adventure
Ride count: 18
When Disney’s California Adventure opened in 2001, it was supposed to be a the expansion to turn the long-solo Disneyland into a 21st century Disneyland Resort. Unfortunately, California Adventure was a park built on a flawed foundation, serving as an irreverent, odd, comical spoof of the Golden State. “Too much California, not enough Disney,” the park featured practically no characters, nothing for families, and only one ride of true “Disney caliber” – the Lost Legend: Soarin’ Over California.
As our epic Disney California Adventure: Part I and Part II exploration revealed, a cumulative $2 billion in enhancements brought the park not just new rides, but a new underlying philosophy, making the once-regrettable second gate as historic, reverent, and vibrant as Disneyland next door. (Even if – in the years since its grand 2012 “Re-Opening,” the park has weirdly pivoted away from the California theme it worked so hard to install… it hasn’t an IP-free major attraction since its opening day!)
At least by the numbers, California Adventure offers about twice as many rides as EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, or Animal Kingdom. Though perhaps accidentally, it’s a healthy mix of headliners (with a fairly robust – and unique – E-Ticket collection) and “filler” (thanks to the family rides of Pixar Pier and Cars Land, plus family dark rides themed to Monsters Inc., Little Mermaid, Cars, and Toy Story.)
In 2018, Disney squashed ‘a bug’s land,’ exterminating its four family flat rides and instantly dropping California Adventure from number 4 to number 7 on this list. The 2021 opening of its replacement – Avengers Campus – brought just one new ride (WEB SLINGERS: A Spider-Man Adventure), representing a net loss for the park, and cementing it in seventh.
What’s next? After being confirmed, then delayed, then canceled, then re-imagined, then delayed, an Avengers E-Ticket was re-confirmed at the 2024 D23 Expo. Named Avengers: Infinity Defense, the ride won’t be the hyper-technical thrill ride Disney described in 2017. Instead, it’ll be a family-friendly dark ride that – oddly enough – is set to the use Disney’s reverse-engineered version of the “SCOOP” ride system made famous on the Modern Marvel: The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man back in 1999. Onboard, riders will race into the multiverse to stop a variant of Thanos from destroying the campus forever.
At the same conference, we learned that it won’t be alone. Avengers Campus will also gain a ride that will use KUKA Robo-Arms to latch onto guest pods, swinging them around to create an interestingly technological flat ride that works “in-universe” as an experimental hero-training trial that repurposes assembly line robotic arms – perhaps “leftover” from the land’s former use as a Stark Motors engineering facility. It’s an interesting concept that’ll be as much fun to watch as it is to ride… and maybe, fulfills a contract Disney had with KUKA given that the arms were allegedly meant to play a role in the original “U-Ticket” level ride that fell off the table post-COVID.
And that’s not all. Also made official at the 2024 D23 Expo: California Adventure will gain a portal to the distant alien moon of Pandora, constructing a new land themed to 20th Century Fox’s Avatar film series. Set in an ancestral cove and tied to the second film in the franchise, the West Coast version of Pandora will be anchored by a boat ride.
However, rather than the placid and far-too-brief N’avi River Journey in Florida’s Pandora, the California land’s boat ride is rumored to use the highly-advanced ride system behind Shanghai’s Pirate ride, meaning it can slow down, speed up, reverse direction, and tackle drops. Imagineers promise a “dynamic, intense and emotional” experience from the attraction, meaning it’s meant to fuse the beauty and grace of Na’vi River Journey with the thrills and awe of Flight of Passage into a single attraction.
And last but not least, the park will gain a second elaborate boat ride themed to Pixar’s Coco. It’s likely that this ride will be musical and meandering, smartly expanding California Adventure’s family appeal and its dark ride count, giving the park an all-ages, indoor attraction filled with animatronics in the vein of its older sisters – Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, or “it’s a small world.”
What do multiversal trips to the African nation of Wakanda, portals to the alien moon of Pandora, or rivers through Mexico’s land of the dead have to do with California? At this point, we can only be glad that Disneyland’s second gate really does stand a chance of being a standalone, full-day park. When it’s all said and done, California Adventure will contain a healthy count of E-Tickets, some desirable IPs, and an ambitious ride count. Let’s just be glad that it’s not being renamed Disney Adventure World… yet.
Unfortunately, the expansions of Avengers Campus forced the the closure of the park’s charming Red Car Trolley – a Buena Vista Street equivalent of Main Street’s vehicles – in February 2025 by eliminating the barn where the trolleys are parked and maintained. It’s possible Disney could alter the ride’s tracks and construct a new barn elsewhere, but assuming they won’t, the +4 of rides announced at D23 will net to a +3. That’ll still be enough to jump California Adventure back to fourth position on this list! For now, though, it slides down to number 8 – a precipitous fall from its one-time ranking as number four.
7. Hong Kong Disneyland
Ride Count: 19
When Hong Kong Disneyland opened in 2005, it was the third of three under-built parks (and the only “Castle Park”) constructed in the waning days of Michael Eisner’s tenure. Fittingly, Hong Kong Disneyland opened as by far the smallest Disneyland-style park on Earth both in scale and scope. For instance, its Fantasyland contained just one dark ride – The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. (The original Disneyland contains six.)
Of the park’s 11 opening day rides, only 2 (the Jungle River Cruise and Space Mountain) could even remotely rank as “headliners,” and certainly neither made the minuscule park a must-visit for anyone who’d been to any other Disney Park. Piecemeal additions – like “it’s a small world” and Autopia – came online in the park’s first half-decade, but clearly, like all of Disney’s early-2000s parks, Hong Kong would need a major reinvestment campaign to stay afloat.
In 2010, the park launched an exceptional growth spurt, opening three brand-new mini-lands over three years. Grizzly Gulch, Toy Story Land, and Mystic Point together created an unprecedented “outer loop” beyond the park’s Railroad. Altogether, the three lands netted the park 2 original E-Tickets (Big Grizzly Mountain Mine Cars and the Modern Marvel: Mystic Manor), plus Toy Story Land’s inevitable three family flat rides.
It was nice, but – given the rise of “nearby” Shanghai Disneyland – not quite enough. In 2016, Disney agreed to another wave of upgrades – this time, to the tune of $1.6 billion. The products of it included a new castle (above), a Frozen land (anchored by a copy of EPCOT’s Modern Marvel: Frozen Ever After plus a family roller coaster, and Stark Expo sub-section of Tomorrowland (featuring an Iron Man simulator and an Ant-Man redesign of the park’s Buzz Lightyear blaster)… altogether, a net +3 to the park’s ride count.
What’s next? The evolution of the Stark Expo mini-land will continue with a new headlining thrill ride themed to Spider-Man. While we didn’t get many details about the Hong Kong Marvel ride, the artwork surely suggests that this will be a hardware clone of the “DCA Tower of Terror” ride model – the one used in Anaheim, Tokyo, and Paris. If that’s the case, it’ll create an interesting spread: four rides that are mechanically the same, but have vastly different wraps.
6. Parc Disneyland (Paris)
Ride Count: 21
When Disneyland Paris opened in 1992, its theme park was pretty quickly recognized as the most beautiful and detailed Disneyland-style park on Earth. The park was carefully crafted to give the inherently American concept of Disneyland a European spin that the French would accept, smartly blending style and substance to create something familiar, but more fantastical. Put in simple terms, Disneyland Paris’ castle park somehow has the charm and coziness of Disneyland, the size and grandeur of Magic Kingdom, and the storytelling and detail of DisneySea.
When the Parisian park borrowed from American classics, it did something unusual… it reinvented them! As we saw in our hand-drawn HERE & THERE ride layout collection, the stories you think you know were given an entirely unique stylistic spin to fit into the beautiful and storied park, forming spectacular new rides like Phantom Manor and Space Mountain: De la Terre á la Lune. That makes almost all of Disneyland Paris’ rides – even the ones you think you know – fresh experiences.
Despite its glowing international acclaim, Paris’ Disneyland is in a constant state of catch-up as it tries to recoup the finances that continue to bleed from the undervalued and overbuilt park. The 2002 opening of Walt Disney Studios only strained the resort more. Thankfully, a multi-year effort to beautify the park and restore it to its grand origin is in effect, and in the meantime, the park finally swapped its Lost Legend: STAR TOURS for the upgraded version other parks debuted years earlier. Still, as focus remains on the Studios park for its multi-year rebuild, expect still more overlays and entertainment offerings as the main draws for Parc Disneyland.
What’s next? Nothing known at this time.