By now, you know the story. Throughout 2010, James Cameron’s Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time. The very next year – faced with the undeniable success of Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Disney optioned the 20th Century Fox film for its theme parks in a global, exclusive deal.
A half-decade of fan revolts followed, plus plenty of op-eds about how little people seemed to care about Avatar; how it had left no memorable moments, iconic quotes, beloved characters, or devoted fan base in pop culture. Then, 2017’s Pandora: The World of Avatar opened at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, suggesting that maybe none of that mattered – that Walt Disney Imagineering could create an entirely new corner of the Avatar world, sync it to the rhythms and themes of Animal Kingdom, and sever The World of Avatar from the movies altogether to create a place that could resonate with guests who loved the film… and just as importantly, the seeming majority who’d seen it, but couldn’t name a single character.
Unlike Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley, Pandora’s “Valley of Mo’ara” wasn’t “plucked from the screen at all.” Instead, it offered guests a chance to visit a previously-unseen “corner” of Pandora; one where they wouldn’t be beholden to already-told stories and could instead create their own. Pretty inarguably, it works, positioning Animal Kingdom’s land as a place where visitors encounter the flaura and fauna of Pandora as eco-tourists, comfortably separated from the characters, plot, and even setting of the films. It worked… And there’s no question that Disney took some of ingredients of Pandora and applied it to their next major project…
Timeline Tethering
In 2012 (after Disney had already announced their licensing of Avatar, by the way), Disney purchased Lucasfilm. And before the decade’s end, their would-be magnum opus of the Wizarding World-style “Living Land” had arrived: Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. Like Pandora, it doesn’t bring to life a specific place seen in the films, but a new planet where guests can “Live Your Own Star Wars Adventure.” In that way, it’s clear that Imagineers had learned a lot from Pandora!
But Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge made some decidedly different decisions. For example, it’s not an open-ended adventure. Quite the contrary, the land is set on a single, recurring day that maps onto the highly academic and studied timeline of Star Wars. It’s also incredibly self-serious and highly inflexible, deeply tethered to Star Wars canon (meaning Disney’s allowance of timeline-breaking characters is an exception, not a rule).
Worse, the moment it’s anchored to happens to fall in the Disney-produced sequel trilogy. Sure, it turns out that J. J. Abrams-helmed sequel trilogy was wildly uneven, with declining critical and commercial success in each entry and a final entry that left a bad taste in fans’ mouths… but worse, the trilogy is (gulp) over. It must’ve sounded good back when the land was in development alongside the films, but now, Disney has a permanent land themed to a completed film franchise that certainly doesn’t have the staying power of the original trilogy from the ’70s and ’80s. Oops.
Star Wars is broad, informal, and fun. So it might’ve been smart to make a broader, less formal, and more fun land to celebrate it. Instead, Disney locked its land onto what was timely instead of what was timeless, inseparably attaching its permanent land to a sequel and requiring knowledge of a now-finished franchise to understand. Meaning maybe they’d misunderstood the lessons that Pandora or Cars Land or Avengers Campus taught…
And that brings us to Disney’s apparent next Avatar attraction and a tricky choice around its potential direction… Read on…
Avatar Rebounds
For most of the six-year period between Disney’s 2011 announcement of Pandora: The World of Avatar and the land’s opening in 2017, the franchise was associated with massive fan resistance to the concept, lingering questions about whether Avatar deserved a permanent land in the Disney Park, and whether or not the franchise would actually endure at all. Even when Pandora proved critics wrong, it seemed that despite Disney’s exclusive, global licensing of the franchise, the Animal Kingdom land would probably be the only Avatar attraction.
That changed when Disney acquired 20th Century Fox altogether in 2019, and was assured when 2022’s The Way of Water proved that Avatar would stick around after all. Sure, we might argue that yet again, Avatar has disappeared from pop culture as of the moment its latest film left theaters… a troubling sign given that a franchise’s popularity has to persist outside of its big screen releases if you want to create an eternal, intergenerational IP like Star Wars. But bolstered by the second film’s astounding box office showing, the news came from on high in 2023: Disneyland Resort would soon become home to an “Avatar experience” of its own.
Let’s start out by saying that no one outside of Disney Imagineering and James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment knows exactly what Disney’s next move is when it comes to Disney Parks and Avatar. Cynics suggested that the carefully-worded “Avatar experience” could be something as simple as an interactive exhibit in Downtown Disney; “Pixie Dusters” speculated it could be as massive as a standalone, boutique Avatar park of intimate animal encounters and rides. Or, of course, it could’ve also just meant plopping Animal Kingdom’s Flight of Passage into Tomorrowland or Hollywood Land.
In Spring 2024, though, the picture became clearer.
The Land of Avatar
Bolstered by shareholders’ rejections of an activist investor’s pursuit of a seat on Disney’s board and Anaheim’s anticipated passage of the “DisneylandForward” rezoning effort, Disney CEO Bob Iger began in March 2024 to replace the word “experience” with “land.” Then, in April, a piece of “Blue Sky” concept art (above) set the scale. Sure, in the style of Disney’s recent, frustrating half-reveals, Disney spokespeople insist this is not an official announcement; just a peek into the kinds of experiences they’re considering – subject to change or outright cancellation.
Obviously, there are no concrete details to share. Fans speculate from the art that this version of an Avatar land would contain neither Flight of Passage nor Na’vi River Journey, but a new Avatar E-Ticket… an indoor/outdoor boat ride likely using the ride system (and perhaps layout) of Shanghai Disneyland’s one-of-a-kind Pirates of the Caribbean. Then there’d likely be the staples – Avatar shopping, dining, and perhaps “wildlife” encounters, like an Animatronic Banshee meet-and-greet. It’s hardly worth wondering if this land could be shoehorned into Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, wedged into California Adventure, or built on an expansion plot potentially made real by DisneylandForward, because at this point, nothing may happen at all.
But as a whole, the image is instructive: almost certainly, Disney plans to go big when it comes to their second Avatar land; and notably, to diverge from their “copy and paste” strategy that created two identical Galaxy’s Edge lands. Part of that is necessary. Disneyland’s two theme parks are far too small to house the massive scale of Animal Kingdom’s Pandora, and its neighbors far too hostile to accommodate floating mountains hovering over their backyards.
If, for a moment, we take this concept art at face value, however, we have to wonder if Disney is making the same mistakes as Galaxy’s Edge did all over again…
Back to Basics
If we imagine that the next piece of Pandora brought to life is the one in Disney’s concept art, then it appears that Disneyland’s version of the land would be heavily influenced by The Way of Water. In fact, the land seems to bring to life the Cove of the Ancestors first seen in that film. A sacred place for the ocean-faring Metkayina tribe of Na’vi first seen in the sequel, the Cove is beautiful – and far more right-sized for Disneyland’s small parks that the expansive Valley of Mo’ara at Animal Kingdom.
But it also might lack the flexibility that makes the Valley of Mo’ara work. If, after all, Disneyland’s Avatar experience does take the shape of this plucked-from-the-screen Cove, it suggests that you might want to know something about the second film in the series to appreciate it. It could shift the concept of the land from a timeless, choose-your-own-adventure space to a oh yeah, I remember that from the movie space, suggesting we’ll follow in the film characters’ footprints rather than forging our own.
Guided by the park’s patron saint, Joe Rohde, Animal Kingdom’s Avatar land was severed from the films, ushering us into a new corner of Pandora strengthened and made timeless by the deeply embedded themes of the park. But plopped into Disneyland under the current, IP mandate age of Imagineering, would it be a surprise if the anchoring ride of this new Avatar land connected explicitly to The Way of Water, locking the land into its timeline and requiring knowledge of its characters and plot?
And like Galaxy’s Edge, would that kind of Avatar land look short-sighted when the Avatar franchise’s final film releases in theaters? Ten years after? Twenty? Fifty? Without the timelessness inherent in Animal Kingdom’s version of the land, will Pandora blend effortlessly into Disneyland’s parks, or will it feel like yet another knee-jerk reaction based solely on box office?
It might not matter… This is the age of the Disney+ Park mindset, in which the mandate is simple: add hot box office properties to the parks as quickly as possible. Sure, Pandora may not match the timeless, literary bar set by Adventureland, Fantasyland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland, but like Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, it’s clear that that’s not a prerequisite for joining Disneyland anymore. A “plucked from the screen” Avatar land set firmly in the timeline of The Way of Water may be coming… Unless Imagineers work smart and make magic happen again…
What do you think? Without Joe Rohde at the helm, do you think Imagineers will learn the right lessons from Animal Kingdom’s version of the land, or will they make the Galaxy’s Edge mistakes all over again? And maybe more to the point, does Avatar deserve a permanent land at Disneyland Resort? If so, what form do you hope it takes – a ride? A land? At Disneyland? Or California Adventure? Why?
