As crazy as it sounds, a small indie film was shot almost entirely in Walt Disney World and Disneyland, completely under the Mouse’s nose. Escape from Tomorrow is the polar opposite of the standard Disney all-ages fare, a fantasy-psychological horror film about a man whose life falls apart during a family trip to Orlando.
The movie didn’t receive stellar reviews, but it raised a lot of attention because of how the cast and crew were able to make a whole feature-length motion picture without getting caught (though they came close.) Here are some facts about the unsanctioned movie set in Walt Disney World.
10. The plot
It’s the last day of a family vacation at Walt Disney World and Jim White is called by his boss, who tells him that he has been laid off. He doesn’t tell anyone, becomes entranced by two French girls, and starts having hallucinations on Disney park rides. It’s very strange, but it only gets stranger. Jim ends up in a secret facility under the Spaceship Earth in Epcot, interrogated by a robot.
Like I said, the movie is very weird and probably wouldn’t be entertaining to Disney fans, but what is of interest is how the crew was able to film most of it at the Disney parks.
9. It was born out of the writer/director’s mixed emotions about Disney World
The man behind Escape from Tomorrow, Randy Moore, went to Disney World every summer as a kid when he visited his father, and he enjoyed his time there. However, the regular trips also reminded Randy of his parents’ divorce. In addition, when he went to Disney World with his wife, who wasn’t American, he saw the park through a different lens.
8. The budget
Escape from Tomorrow cost $650,000 to make, which sounds like a lot but is a fairly modest budget for a movie. Most of the money came from an inheritance Randy Moore received from his grandparents. The movie was a huge risk for him. It only grossed around $170,000 in the box office according to IMDB, so the risk probably didn’t pan out financially. However, Escape from Tomorrow certainly got Moore on the map as a filmmaker to watch, and I bet we’ll see him making more movies.
7. It was filmed at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland
Image © Disney.
Not only did the crew shoot Escape from Tomorrow at Walt Disney World, they also spent two weeks in Anaheim. Crew members bought season passes to both parks so that they had enough time to film the movie. They went to both Disney resorts so they were less likely to raise both’s employees’ suspicions too high.
6. The iconic rides
Image © Disney.
Moore wrote a script that necessitated scenes on eight popular attractions. One of the most memorable scenes takes place on It’s a Small World. The actors needed to ride it “at least” 12 times to get it just right. The crew members complained the most about the long lines for Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin.
5. The equipment
Image © Apple.
The Escape for Tomorrow crew used high-quality cameras, but they were ones that looked like a typical camera a family would bring to the parks so that they would blend in among the other attendees visiting the Disney parks. Because they had almost no control over the lighting, it was filmed in monochrome mode a.k.a. good old-fashioned black and white. Moore liked how the lack of color gave the movie a surreal, dreamlike feel, and how it would mean audiences would have no choice but to see the Disney parks in an unfamiliar way.
Maybe the most important tools used on “set” were iPhones, because the crew and the actors were able to look like regular attendees using their phones as they learned their scripts. They also used iPhones to record sound, supplementing the sound they got from recorders taped to the actors’ bodies.
4. Special circumstances
Because they were filming incognito, Randy Moore and his crew had a lot of obstacles that no other movies have. They had to scout out the places they were going to film almost a dozen times before cameras even rolled so that they could get in and out as quickly as possible. The rehearsals all had to be in hotel rooms, so actors were only seeing their “set” right before they started performing. They even charted the position of the sun so that they could predict what the natural lighting would be like at the parks.
3. After Disney Park shoots
The crew had to film some scenes, such as ones with a lot of tourists in the background, against a green screen. It was very obvious which scenes they used green screens on in the final product. Escape was then edited in South Korea so that Disney wouldn’t find out about it too early. Sound editing was extremely difficult, between the recorders taped to the actors’ bodies and the copyrighted music played on rides like It’s a Small World that they had to remove.
2. Disney didn’t interfere
Nobody really thought Escape from Tomorrow would get a wide release after it was revealed at Sundance, but Disney still has not commented on the film and will most likely not be taking legal action. That may be in part because the movie was billed as a satirical take on the Disney brand, and satire is protected by copyright.
1. Not the first
Image © Revolver Entertainment.
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Escape from Tomorrow was actually not the first movie to film without permission inside a Disney theme park. Filming there has become a recent fad. Popular street artist Banksy filmed a scene for Exit Through the Gift Shop and managed to sneak the footage out even though he was briefly detained by security. In 2011 there was a viral found footage short film, Missing in the Mansion, shot at the Haunted Mansion.
Escape from Tomorrow probably won’t be the last movie shot in a theme park, either. By not dropping the hammer on it Disney may have opened the floodgates to more movies or short films made inside the parks. Whether that’s good or bad we’ve yet to learn.
