Originally published at: Disney announces huge theme park expansions - Boing Boing
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The existing Indiana Jones ride in Anaheim was the only real disappointment in my otherwise wonderful last visit to the park. I’m sure it had its moment when it opened, but it just didn’t age well. I have no doubt the Imagineers will improve and “plus” it based on these plans.
If they keep doing these upgrades to the parks, they can easily get non-fanatic visitors like me to spend serious cash there every 8 years or so despite the rising costs.
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A new “Villains Land” in the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World (Orlando, Florida)
Will DeathSantis be included?
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None of this makes a lick of sense. Tom Sawyer island is under-utilized because it’s an island. You need to take a boat ride to get on and off it which severely limits the number of visitors per hour you can handle. Putting a popular new ride there would not work. In-filling some or all of Rivers of America makes even less sense unless they are abandoning the Frontierland theme altogether.
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It serms like they’re headed in that direction, trading in the Old West of Tom Sawyer and Davy Crockett that was still popular when the park opened for the “New West” of the Cars franchise.
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It shouldn’t cost a lot to replicate mar a lago.
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I agree that it wouldn’t make much sense if you had to take a boat to the island in order to get on the new ride. But maybe that’s not what they have in mind? For comparison, in Disneyland Paris the Big Thunder Mountain ride is mostly on an island but you board the ride on the mainland and it passes through a tunnel.
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Note that all of the plans announced were themed on existing Disney movie properties, continuing Disney’s trend of basing theme park attractions not on new, original concepts but only on existing IP.
I haven’t exactly been to Disney a lot, but my favorites were always the stuff that wasn’t based on specific characters and movies, like Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, the Matterhorn, the part of the train ride around the park that randomly takes you to the time of the dinosaurs, Horizons at Epcot, etc. I guess there’ll be no reason to return in the future, as gradually all of that is torn down or remodeled to make way for stuff I’ve either never heard of or enjoy less.
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I’ve been saddened to see how many people, including a lot who should probably know better, think that the Pirates ride is based on the movie franchise rather than the other way around.
Matterhorn was inspired by Third Man on the Mountain though.
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If they need more space they could always annex Knott’s Berry Farm.
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I can’t be the only person getting the feeling that they are overpromising on the basis of someone’s knocked-together AI images. But maybe that’s just what everyone else is doing nowadays.
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They’ve been promising a lot of these expansions for years so there’s probably a lot of skepticism to overcome. For example, they’ve been talking about a major ride for the Avengers Campus since at least 2017 but it’s been repeatedly sent back to the drawing board.
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One of the more frustrating ones for me was the additional missions for the Millennium Falcon ride. The original plan was to open the ride in 2019 with multiple missions and they got very close to finishing some of the others when the ride was being built and tested, but they got cut at the last minute for budget. Now we have to wait until 2026.
I know that it’s a lot of work to design and test what’s essentially a new level for an existing video game but as a mechanical engineer I can’t help having the mindset “what’s taking so long?? It’s just software! The machine is already built!”
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Yeah seems like that should have been an easy one since it’s basically the theme park equivalent of buying the DLC for an existing video game.
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Given that I live about fifteen minutes from EPCOT and Hollywood Studios, this is welcome news indeed!
Between this and Universal’s expansion, I’m happy to see all the work going into I-4 and the surrounding highways, because if more attractions = more people, we’re gonna need it!
I was hoping they might add in the rumoured third attraction to Batuu, but a new Falcon mission will have to do 
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This is true, but it’s also true they’ve altered the ride to include direct references to the movies, specifically animatronics of Jack Sparrow and Captain Barbossa.
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It’s even worse in Epcot where they seem to be eliminating the educational aspects in favor of yet more superhero and princess junk. I know some people think Epcot with its national pavilions and exhibits about farming is “boring”, but I liked it far better than the Magic Kingdom, personally.
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Signing up for Disney+ will waive your right to sue Disney for anything and everything.
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Damn, that’s a really bad move on the part of Disney’s legal team just for the PR fallout alone. Apparently it’s a novel argument that they haven’t been using in the past, though. Per the original article:
If this case gets much publicity I’m betting they’ll backtrack.
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