A Whole Lot of Change Is Coming to Disney Theme Parks

Josh D’Amaro, the Chairman of Disney Experiences, had something to prove at the Disney theme parks panel at D23 this year. 2022’s panel was a weirdly non-committal affair full of conjecture about “blue sky” ideas that were being batted around, and it would’ve been a really bad look if they pulled a repeat of that in 2024. So when D’Amaro took the stage at the Honda Center this weekend he came ready to drop some actual news. You know, when he wasn’t ceding the spotlight to a constant procession of musical numbers.

D’Amaro announced a number of projects coming to Disney theme parks around the globe, all of them in active development and with construction already gearing up in some cases. The biggest news for American park-goers is the slew of new attractions coming to Disney World and Disney California Adventure, all of them based on popular movies and characters from Disney, Pixar and Marvel.

Let’s start with Disney World, since three of its four parks were among the panel’s biggest focuses. The Magic Kingdom, the original Disney World theme park, will be getting two new lands. One of them will be a “reimagined part of Frontierland” with a new Cars-themed area. It won’t be a recreation of Radiator Springs from Disney California Adventure, but something new, and will feature two attractions. One is an “offroad race” whose concept art resembles something like Radiator Springs Racers only in a more pastoral, park-like setting. The other is a ride for very young children, presumably like the carnival-style rides featured at Radiator Springs in California. D’Amaro didn’t say in what part of Frontierland this new addition would be going, which set off alarm bells for Magic Kingdom fans worried about it replacing existing attractions; sure enough, this morning Disney confirmed that the Cars area will be built on the space that has been home to Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer Island since the park opened in 1971. (I’ll have more about that decision here at Paste soon.)

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The other major Magic Kingdom announcement was basically positioned as the main event of the whole panel. At the end of the three hour presentation D’Amaro introduced the singer Rita Ora, who did a rendition of Kaa’s song “Trust in Me” from The Jungle Book. It was the prelude to an announcement Disney fans have been hoping for for decades: a “villains land” focused entirely on Disney’s legendary baddies. The new land will feature two major attractions, stores, restaurants, and what D’Amaro called “fiendish fun.” He went on to say it’ll feature “storytelling on a grand scale that only Disney can deliver” and be “a fearless new vision” for Disney, and the live audience certainly seemed to love this one. We don’t know an official name for this one yet, but we do know where it’ll be going: in the expansion plot behind Big Thunder Railroad. That would make this one an actual addition, and not just a replacement, like the Cars area.

Finally, the Magic Kingdom is also getting something that I’m personally extremely excited for: a Pirates of the Caribbean-themed bar. What can I say: I love Disney bars. That bar is scheduled to open in 2025, whereas construction will start on both the Cars and villains lands in 2025. And for the first time in years the Magic Kingdom will be getting a new, original nighttime spectacular, Disney Starlight, in 2025.

Elsewhere at Disney World, a new Monsters Inc. land will be coming to Disney’s Hollywood Studios, featuring a high-tech new ride that will be the first suspended roller coaster at any one of the Disney theme parks. Based on concept art and D’Amaro’s statements, the land will invite guests into Monstropolis, where they’ll get a tour of the Laugh Factory. Disney hasn’t said where in Hollywood Studios this will go, but there’s a lot of concern it could replace the small Muppets area near the back of the park. If you’re a big fan of Muppet*Vision 3D, you might want to go out of your way to see it again soon. There are a couple other places within the park where the new addition could go, so don’t worry too much yet.

D’Amaro also updated us on the plans for Disney’s Animal Kingdom, particularly what will be found in the upcoming Tropical Americas that will be replacing Dinoland. As expected, a new Indiana Jones ride will be coming to Animal Kingdom, taking the place of Dinosaur. It’ll have a different story than the one in Disneyland, taking place inside a Mayan temple that’s home to a mythical creature. Tropical Americas itself will be as themed, lived-in, and realistic-feeling as the Africa and Asia sections of Animal Kingdom, with two other attractions in addition to Indy. One is a classic carousel with wooden carvings of Disney characters, whereas the other is the first Disney ride based on Encanto. Guests will ride through the Casa Madrigal, a.k.a. Casita, on the day that Antonio receives his magical gift of speaking to animals. We can probably expect some shenanigans and/or hijinks during our tour. All of this is scheduled to open in 2027. Meanwhile, Zootopia: Better Together, which is replacing It’s Tough to Be a Bug inside the Tree of Life at the heart of Animal Kingdom, will be opening in Winter 2025.

If you were hoping to hear updates on any of the EPCOT plans that were announced before the pandemic and then quietly canceled, you got bupkus. Test Track 3.0 will be opening in 2025, though, and they also announced a new lounge coming to Spaceship Earth. Sipping a cocktail inside that big old orb? Sign me up.

Let’s fly to the other side of the country. Disneyland Resort will continue to receive its fair share of love, with Disney California Adventure especially getting a number of additions. The previously announced Avatar “experience” was revealed to be a full-on expansion at California Adventure. It will be set on a different part of the planet Pandora than the land in Orlando, with its own striking and unique rock formations. It’ll be based more on the first two sequels in the series, last year’s Way of Water and the upcoming Fire and Ash, with a new boat ride. More will be announced on this one in the future.

Next up: a new Coco ride is also coming to California Adventure. It’ll be a music-heavy boat ride influenced by classic attractions like Pirates and with state-of-the-art audio-animatronics taking us into the Land of the Dead. Coco’s maybe the best animated movie out of either Disney or Pixar in the last 15 to 20 years, and I can’t get enough of classic Disney boat rides, so I’m personally very excited for this one.

Finally, Avengers Campus at California Adventure will be getting not one but two new attractions. Avengers: Infinity Defense is the official name for the major E-ticket Avengers ride that was announced two years ago; concept art shows ride vehicles that resemble those used at Universal’s Spider-Man ride, and the story promises to be a multiverse-hopping adventure to thwart the rise of King Thanos. The second new attraction sounds a lot like the old Sum of All Thrills roller coaster simulator at EPCOT; Stark Flight Lab looks like a coaster with one of those KUKA arm systems, which will take guests on “flight tests” designed by Tony Stark himself. They hinted there will be multiple different flight patterns, and also announced that Robert Downey Jr. would be returning to play Tony Stark. This would give Avengers Campus four rides in total, and hey, it really needed something to help justify its existence. These two attractions will hopefully bring the excitement the land currently lacks.

Disneyland’s gearing up for its 70th anniversary in 2025, and D’Amaro promised they’d have more news on that in the future. Not much was announced for the very first of the Disney theme parks at D23. Its version of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure did get an opening date—Nov. 15, 2024. And D’Amaro also announced a new audio-animatronic show that’s sure to be controversial, Walt Disney: A Magical Life, featuring Disney’s very first audio-animatronic of Walt Disney himself. The new show will be located inside the Main Street Opera House, the longtime home of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. Eventually the two shows will alternate, but A Magical Life will run exclusively during its opening window. The concept art shows Disney standing in front of the desk in his studio office, with a map of Disneyland pinned to a board behind him. Some of Disney’s own family has publicly stated their disapproval whenever a Walt animatronic has been rumored in the past, saying Walt himself didn’t want that to happen, and that’s why this will no doubt cause some controversy among the fan base.

The big news internationally is the transformation of Walt Disney Studios Park at Disneyland Paris into Disney Adventure World. This is the second and younger park at Disneyland, and often considered the worst of all Disney theme parks. A number of new expansions will hopefully improve it over the next few years. The first is a new Frozen-inspired land opening in 2026; concept art for World of Frozen showed a charming little Scandinavian seaside town with a large snow-covered mountain looming over it. D’Amaro also unveiled a new Lion King-themed area for the park, with a log flume that looks a lot like a Lion King-themed Splash Mountain. The renamed park will also have a new central lagoon, which will be the site of a new nighttime show featuring projects, music, water screens, and more. Disneyland Paris the park, meanwhile, will get a new nighttime spectacular that will also be the park’s debut of projections on Main Street’s buildings.

Finally, Tokyo Disneyland will be getting a new parade called Reach for the Stars, featuring characters from Big Hero 6, Up, and, for the first time in Tokyo, some of Marvel’s super heroes. Hong Kong Disneyland will be getting a new Stark Expo ride that looks like it might be a drop tower of some kind; concept art shows guests sitting in an elevator-looking vehicle that Spider-Man has saved with his webbing. And Shanghai Disneyland will be getting a thrilling roller coaster also starring Spider-Man.

And one final note from the panel: Disney Cruise Lines revealed that it’ll add four more ships between 2027 and 2031, ultimately giving it 13 total. This was a genuine surprise, as DCL hasn’t even launched its two newest ships, the Disney Treasure and the Disney Destiny, or another new ship that will be sailing out of Japan. Clearly these cruises are a hit.

Like I said, Disney really needed to deliver some news and major announcements at D23 this year, and as you can tell, they absolutely did. It’s always possible—maybe even likely—that not all of this will be built, or that some of these projects will undergo so many changes that the final product turns out very different from what Disney announced this weekend. Only time will tell how they turn out—or what current attractions, if any, go away to make room for them.

For more information on everything announced at D23 this weekend, check out the Disney Parks Blog.