Disney Hotel New York—The Art of Marvel Tries to Combine Big City Class and Comic Book Fun at Disneyland Paris
All photos courtesy of Disney except the Jack Kirby Legacy Gallery photo by Garrett MartinDisneyland Paris isn’t technically in Paris, but it sits only about 30 kilometers from the heart of the city—or 20 miles, for us metric system holdouts. It’s a quick and easy trip up the RER line to get there, and with so many great and affordable hotels throughout Paris, that’s typically what I do when I visit the park: I stay in a hotel in the city and take the train in the morning for a day at Disneyland. There’s something special about staying on property at a Disney park, though, whether it’s at one of the two dozen or so hotels deep in the bubble of Disney World, or at Anaheim’s luxurious Disneyland Hotel or Grand Californian. Not only is it more convenient to stay near the parks, but some Disney hotels have theming and design elements that rival what’s found in the parks. At their best Disney hotels serve as an extension of the theme parks themselves, extending the hyperreality and sense of comfort you find in a place like Disneyland throughout your whole trip.
Disneyland Paris has seven hotels—a far cry from Disney World’s 25 or so, but over twice what you’ll find at Disneyland. Price points, proximity to the parks, and the level and quality of theming all vary, but if you really want to stay on property, you’ll probably find something that fits your style (if not your budget). The Disneyland Hotel, which is actually attached to the main park, is currently closed for renovation, so the hotel closest to the parks that you can stay at right now is the recently refurbished Disney Hotel New York—The Art of Marvel. As you can probably tell by the name, it’s themed to the superheroes of Marvel Comics.
Disney’s Hotel New York originally opened in 1992 alongside the park itself. It was designed by then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s favorite architect, Michael Graves, a preeminent ‘80s postmodernist whose Disney work includes the Swan and Dolphin hotels at Disney World and the Team Disney building in Burbank. (He also designed a lot of non-Disney buildings around the world, also worked with the Memphis Group; dude’s legit, although his style was largely out of fashion for the last couple of decades.) Hotel New York never tried to capture a realistic depiction of the city itself. It was the New York seen in movies and sitcoms in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, a glossy, colorful, unreal version of New York as interpreted through Graves’ distinctive vision. It might’ve made sense to guests in the early ‘90s, but by the late ‘10s it had developed a rep among Disney fans as being laughably out of date; again, it wasn’t like the real New York, they’d say, but the New York you’d see in Friends—old enough to feel out of touch, but not old enough to feel nostalgic or charming. As the 2010s came to a close it was time for a refresh, and Disney did what today’s Disney does in those moments: looked to its deep bench of intellectual property.
Most Marvel superheroes are based in New York. This hotel was already themed to New York. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was at the peak of its popularity when the retheme was announced in 2017. It just made sense. And so Disney’s Hotel New York became Disney Hotel New York—The Art of Marvel, with Marvel iconography and comic book art on the walls, new restaurants and bars based on the movies and the city so many of them take place in, and—to soothe anybody worried about an invasion from the Disney Newport Bay Club hotel, which sits directly across Lake Disney from Hotel New York—three giant statues of Iron Man, Captain Marvel, and Black Panther standing sentry at the hotel’s back entrance. The Marvel edge is undeniable and found throughout the hotel, and although this absolutely isn’t an all-encompassing fantasy experience like Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, I can easily see younger Marvel fans feeling closer to the heroes and stories they love by staying here.
It’ll be a harder sell for adults, though. Hotel New York has some of the same problems as the Avengers Campus lands at Walt Disney Studios Park and Disney California Adventure. The theme isn’t fantastic enough. Avengers Campus feels like an actual college or tech campus, and Hotel New York feels like a mid-scale modern hotel with a slightly outdated aesthetic. (The refurb wasn’t able to wash away all that ‘90s.) The exterior wants to echo the New York City skyline, but looks more like those cookie cutter mixed-use condo developments gentrifying every inch of every American city. The lobby has the cool gray sheen of a SHIELD facility or Stark lab from the MCU, which fits the style of the movies but won’t “wow” most guests the way Disney’s best hotels do.
The best design touches come straight from the comic books that the movies are based on. Art by comic book illustrators can be found all throughout the hotel, from paintings of characters and memorable scenes by current Marvel artists, to reproductions of covers and interior pages from legendary comic artists. The Jack Kirby Legacy Gallery, named after the king of all superhero artists, who basically created most of the Marvel Universe’s foundation with Stan Lee, pays tribute to a man who Marvel mistreated throughout his life and long disrespected after his death. The “gallery” is basically a hallway to a restaurant, but its entryway has a selection of Kirby covers and reproductions of some of his original black-and-white art pages, and Kirby’s work remains startlingly fresh and dynamic no matter how many times you’ve seen it. The gallery itself is home to rotating exhibits; during my trip it focused on the women of Marvel, with portraits of such characters as She-Hulk and the Black Widow painted by women who have worked on Marvel comics. Comics often feel like an afterthought for modern Marvel, where everything is about the movies or Disney+ TV shows, so it’s nice to see the unique American artform that gave rise to the whole Marvel empire get a moment in the spotlight.
It also offers some cool opportunities for children of all ages to get closer to the superheroes they love. The Super Hero Station, which requires a reservation, is an “immersive photography experience” where you get to pose with Captain America, Spider-Man, and other iconic characters. It’s essentially a meet and greet with fancier photo options, and something you’d expect to find at a Disney-designed Marvel hotel. You can expect to find other common amenities, too, including a swimming pool, gym, and sauna.
Hotel New York excels in at least one other way. Its rooms are fantastic. I don’t want, need, or expect hotel rooms in France to be large, but it’s always great when you do get a room over there that’s bigger than a large walk-in closet. Hotel New York’s rooms are spacious, with wide, comfortable beds that make it hard to wake up in the morning. That sleek, industrial, Stark Enterprises aesthetic makes more of an impression in a hotel room than a hotel lobby, and the way Disney basically hides the TV inside a wall-sized mirror is ingenious. And yes, I have absolutely no complaints on the water pressure. The rooms are the best part of Disney Hotel New York, which is surprising, as my experience with Disney hotels usually involves being blown away by the design and styling of the lobbies before checking into a perfectly adequate but unexceptional room. The Art of Marvel flips that on its head.
Of course most people probably don’t want to spend too much time in their hotel room when they’re staying at an expensive theme park hotel. Hotel New York is a short walk to the Disney Village shopping area and Disneyland Paris’s theme parks, taking about 15 minutes to get to the gate for either park. If you’ve never been to Disneyland Paris before, you’ll want to spend as much time as possible in Disneyland Park, which is one of the most beautiful and well-designed Disney parks in the world. The second park, Walt Disney Studios Park, also exists, for some reason, and if you’re there I guess you might want to poke your head in for a little bit. You’ll probably want to ride the Avengers roller coaster there since you came all this way and it doesn’t exist in the States, even though it’s just a retheme of Disney World’s Aerosmith roller coaster. I recommend you spend as much time as you can in Disneyland Park or even Disney Village, because once you get outside of your hotel room and run out of comic book art to look at Hotel New York’s flaws quickly become apparent.
The biggest problem, as I’ve already touched on, is that the industrial vibe Disney went with for this Marvel hotel lacks the wonder and awe that makes superhero stories so popular. It doesn’t feel like a place where the unexpected or superhuman can happen. They make a half-hearted attempt in the lobby’s Skyline Bar with “windows” that are actually screens. They show the skyline of Marvel’s New York City, with Avengers Tower at the center; occasionally Iron Man will fly by, or Spider-Man will crawl into view and wave at everybody in the bar. This trick works at the Hyperspace Lounge on the Disney Wish cruise ship because you’re in a dark room in an environment that already disconnects you from reality (uh, a cruise ship), and because the CGI at the Star Wars bar doesn’t try to create believable human figures like Iron Man and Spider-Man. Beyond the bad CGI, it all feels disjointed and transparently artificial at the Skyline Bar; instead of placing the bar on the roof of the hotel, where the “skyline” view might seem possible, Disney put it in the lobby, on the ground floor, and right near the main entrance, immediately spoiling any sense of immersion. Also the screen “windows” are obviously on an internal wall, so it’s hard to suspend disbelief that you might actually be looking out over a city; at no point will you forget that on the other side of that wall is part of the hotel. This might sound like nit-picking, but it’s this attention to detail and basic design principles that historically set Disney’s work apart. (The drinks at the Skyline are good, though. Nice and alcoholic, just the way I like ‘em.)
The Skyline is a masterpiece of theme park design compared to the hotel’s other bar. Bleecker Street Lounge sits across from the Skyline, and depending on your frame of reference, it should immediately conjure up one of two associations: either New York’s artsy Greenwich Village, or Dr. Strange, the Marvel character who has lived on Bleecker Street since first being introduced in 1963. What you’ll find is basically a Starbucks with a painting of Dr. Strange on the wall. Sadly the real Bleecker Street of 2023 is probably full of bland, characterless chains (although the Starbucks that moved into the old Bleecker Street Records spot closed down permanently during the pandemic), but we’re not on the real Bleecker Street. We’re in a Disney hotel based on the spectacular, fantastical world of Marvel Comics. When I heard there was a Dr. Strange-themed bar at Hotel New York, I assumed it would look like Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum, with dusty old spell books on the walls and mystical artifacts on display. Instead it’s a brick room with non-descript chairs and tables straight out of a catalog. Some of the bars at Paris’s Disneyland Hotel are beautifully themed, and there’s no reason the Bleecker Street Lounge at Hotel New York can’t be as well, other than Disney not wanting to pay for anything too extravagant. You can buy Dr. Strange-themed drinks at Bleecker Street, but I never got to try one, because somehow this bar is inexplicably only open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. I wouldn’t even call Bleecker Street Lounge minimally themed; it is straight-up just an unthemed hotel bar with a name tangentially connected to a Marvel character. Only a painting on the wall, a drink whose name vaguely refers to Strange’s sling ring (a movie invention not from the comics), and comically inconvenient hours separate this bar from one you can find in any lobby in any major chain hotel in the world.
Bleecker Street Lounge is the nadir of Hotel New York—The Art of Marvel, but it sums up Disney’s disappointing theme park approach to Marvel as a whole. Instead of trying to bring Marvel’s otherworldly aspects to life, Disney time and again takes the easier, cheaper route of focusing on its most Earthbound qualities. Instead of recreating locations from the movies or comics, we get minimally themed corporate campuses and outdated New York hotels that provide only the smallest glimpse into what people love about Marvel. Instead of groundbreaking new attractions, we get rethemed rides from the ‘90s and ‘00s, swapping one brand out for another. The one genuinely great Marvel attraction at a Disney park is the Guardians of the Galaxy roller coaster at EPCOT—a park where Disney legally can’t do too much with its Marvel characters, due to Universal having the theme park rights. Despite raking in billions at the box office, and despite being an indelible part of pop culture for 60 years, Marvel isn’t shown the respect it deserves at Disney’s theme parks.
I imagine most Disneyland Paris guests won’t really care about any of this. The Marvel hotel is probably Marvel enough for them, starting with the suits of Iron Man armor on display in the lobby. It’s a quick walk to the theme parks, the rooms are excellent, and there is a variety of restaurants to choose from. (Sadly we weren’t able to get a reservation for the hotel’s nicer restaurants, but we had some tasty snacks and a dessert at the Skyline.) It’s incredibly expensive for what it is, but you expect that at a Disney hotel—you’re paying for the proximity and the convenience. I haven’t stayed at other Disneyland Paris hotels, but I’ve toured a few of them, and I’d rank the Disneyland Hotel, the Newport Bay Yacht Club, and Disney’s Hotel Sequoia higher than Hotel New York. The former has the class and luxury of the Grand Californian or Grand Floridian, whereas the latter two are themed not to specific IP but to general concepts, and I generally prefer that kind of approach. If Marvel is too irresistible for a draw for you, or if you have a young superhero in training who absolutely needs to stay close to their idols, Disney’s Hotel New York—The Art of Marvel might be worth considering. Just know that it’s not going to transport or immerse you as much as you might hope, or as much as you might expect from a hotel this costly.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.