For Disney Parks fans, the semi-annual D23 Expo is like Christmas and a funeral in one. Every other year, the company’s “Ultimate Fan Event” hosts a Parks & Experiences panel, when Disney executives and Imagineers are on-hand to unveil the list of additions and subtractions the company plans to make to Disney’s theme parks over the years to follow.
This year, the Parks panel is happening on Sunday, September 11, at 10:30 a.m. in Los Angeles. At that time and across the globe, Disney Parks fans will be glued to their seats and phones, following along as Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro hosts a panel that will be filled with excitement, surprises, and – yes – disappointments.
D23 Expo has never been more important for Disney Parks fans than it will be this year. With COVID having seen hundreds of millions of dollars in cancelled projects, Chapek having arisen as a franchise-focused, budget-hawk CEO, Disney World’s 50th Anniversary flatlining, countless perks slashed for guests, and the very unusual scenario where we don’t know about any confirmed major U.S. Disney Parks projects post-2022, what we learn on September 11, 2022 will quite literally reveal the scope and scale of Chapek’s ambitions for Disney Parks for years to come.
So what will be announced at this year’s D23 Expo? Of course, those who know aren’t talking… but if you believe fan rumblings and wishes, here are a few key areas where we might see big announcements (and re-announcements) that will give Parks fans something to talk about for years…
1. The Lost Attractions of EPCOT’s Reimagining
At the last D23 Expo (way back in 2019, when the world was a very different place), all eyes were on EPCOT. For decades, fans had been begging for EPCOT to get a master-planned, all-at-once reimagining to refresh the park and its attractions – the same kind of multi-year reunification and restylization that had seen Disney California Adventure reborn in 2012.
In 2019, it became official that EPCOT would indeed undergo such a multi-year transformation, making the park (in Bob Chapek’s words) “More Disney, more relevant, more timeless, and more family.” (Another way to read that: “More characters, less education, less ’80s, and even more characters.”)
A lot was announced for the park in 2019, including details on what became Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, Space 220, and Harmonious. Of course, a lot was announced that didn’t come to be. We already know that Disney’s completely cut the announced Celebration pavilion, then re-announced a massively scaled-back version of it. (A shame since EPCOT is the one park that really needs a long-lasting, big-budget, master-planned fix instead of still more piecemeal changes and quick-fixes.)
But what many fans are hoping is (re)announced at this year’s D23 Expo are three projects that were all-but-official, then quietly disappeared post-COVID.
A. The Play! Pavilion
The first was the Play pavilion, meant to takeover the space most prominent used for the health-focused pavilion and Lost Legend: Wonders of Life from 1989 to 2007. Completely gutting the interior of the golden dome between Universe of Energy (er, Cosmic Rewind) and Horizons (I mean, Mission: SPACE), the Play pavilion was meant to be stylized as a bustling, neon, cartoon city of Disney Emoji stylized characters, interactive games, and meet-and-greets.
An entire pavilion coming online would obviously be a huge deal. But so far, it hasn’t. No one outside of Disney seems to have any clue how far along the Play project was before COVID budget cuts struck, or if it’s even still moving forward. Since the sight of abandoned pavilions is unfortunately nothing new for EPCOT, it’s not a huge loss… but we have to wonder if Disney will re-up its commitment to the Play pavilion at this D23 Expo, or if this project was quietly killed.
B. A Mary Poppins Attraction
A Mary Poppins mini-land being added to the U.K. pavilion at EPCOT was part of the park’s 2019 announcement roll-out, but when the parks re-opened after COVID, mention of it had been wiped from the EPCOT Experience preview center. It’s not surprising. Disney had not actually announced the details of what would reside in the recreation of Cherry Tree Lane, with many supposing that Mr. Chapek (then just Parks Chairman, now CEO) was more interested in a carousel or even just a meet-and-greet rather than a full dark ride. With the promotional campaign for Mary Poppins Returns now having passed, the project was easy enough to write-off for Chapek’s franchise-focused regime. Would you like to see a Poppins attraction make a comeback for EPCOT, even if it’s “just” a meet-and-greet?
C. Coco in Mexico
Meanwhile, the other project fans are hoping is part of this year’s Parks panel is a little more of a longshot. After all, Disney never officially acknowledged that Pixar’s 2017 film Coco was going to take over the oft-overlooked Gran Fiesta Tour boat ride in EPCOT’s Mexico pavilion… They only suggested it by including a model of Mexico in the EPCOT Experience preview center’s park model (which – aside from Mexico – only featured pavilions with planned expansions), complete with a giant Coco guitar leaning against it. Coco is a stunning film and an obvious fit for the pavilion (especially with World Showcase’s clear “animation integration” plan in action). But will it actually happen?
D. Spaceship Earth
Perhaps the most controversial announced-but-paused changes to EPCOT was the announced reimagining of Spaceship Earth. Don’t misunderstand – Spaceship Earth has undergone several significant redesigns over its lifetime, emerging with new show scenes and new celebrity narration each time. But at its core, Spaceship Earth has always been EPCOT’s “Communication Pavilion,” telling the story of how humans evolved from cave paintings to written language to papyrus to the printing press to the Renaissance to the electric age to the personal computer and on to the boundless interconnectivity offered by the Internet.
But according to Bob Chapek’s announcement, that was about to change. At the 2019 D23 Expo, Chapek announced that a more fundamental redesign of Spaceship Earth was about to commence, shifting the ride’s focus from “communication” to “storytelling.” Though many of the ride’s early scenes about written language would remain, they’d be refocused on how humans learned to tell stories to pass along tradition. Naturally, that would evolve into odes to Disney Animation, with concept art showing a glowing ray from Moana sweeping across the night sky as Polynesian voyagers look on.
In what would’ve likely been a mix of real history and allusions to Disney films, the ride would’ve kinda sorta maintained that epic “EPCOT” ethos, but also been a character-infused thing with major cringe potential. (Imagine a ride that discusses storytellers from throughout human history, but ends in a weird ode to Walt Disney as the “ultimate storyteller” or something. It feels very possible.) This refurbishment wasn’t just a rumor; it was announced, with May 2020 as the start of what was rumored to be a two-year closure. Of course, it didn’t happen. But it could. Spaceship Earth badly needs a mechanical refurbishment, and it seems likely that when that happens, odes to Disney storytelling will make their way in.
So what do you think? Do you want this refurbishment – or any of the others on this list – to come to be? Let us know… And read on, because there’s more to consider…
2. New Tomorrowland at Disneyland
A “great, big, beautiful tomorrow” it’s not. Let’s face it: whether you’re in Disneyland or Magic Kingdom, Tomorrowland is… kind of a mess.
The first and most obvious reason is that since the early 2000s, Tomorrowlands across Disney Parks have been given the unfair role of becoming the de facto “character catch-all” for Disney and Pixar IPs. In what other land would we just allow Star Wars, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., Lilo & Stitch, and Marvel to sort of just… co-exist? Given that substance, it’s no surprise that Tomorrowland doesn’t really have anything to say.
But both Tomorrowlands have a style problem, too. The most iconic iteration of Tomorrowland opened in 1967 in Disneyland (above) and 1975 in Magic Kingdom, when the Space Age aesthetic of rockets and parabolas and pastels and the moon and the power of the molecule was at the forefront of pop culture. Then, both spent the ’90s trying to cover those fantastic futures up.
Magic Kingdom’s answer was the ambitious if timely “Tomorrowland ’94” – a sci-fi alien spaceport of original stories like Alien Encounter and The Timekeeper. Today, Disney is systematically stripping away what remains of that metallic sci-fi city to re-expose the mid-century architecture beneath (which – ta-da! – is back in style!).
But Disneyland’s version of the land is surely worse off for another reason: in the mid-’90s wave of “New Tomorrowland” redesigns, Disneyland was given the short end of the stick. Its “New Tomorrowland ’98” wasn’t a bad idea – a sort of earthy, agricultural, fantasy Tomorrowland culled from development on Disneyland Paris – but its shoestring budget basically amounted to:
- painting the park’s mid-century Space Age architecture (yes, including Space Mountain) dark brown;
- decommissioning the Lost Legend: The PeopleMover for the short-lived, disastrous, high-speed Rocket Rods that were dead after 18 months;
- completely closing the park’s historic Submarine Voyage and leaving its lagoon empty;
- pulling the iconic Rocket Jets from their central platform and building a new, Disneyland-Paris-copied Astro Orbitor on the ground at the land’s entrance, turning it into a massive traffic jam;
- replacing a ride with a pizza restaurant;
- calling it a day
“New Tomorrowland ’98” was bad all around, and efforts to conceal its damage have continued on and off for 25 years. Obviously, nearly everything’s been painted back to whites and blues and purples by now, but some damage is long-lasting. The rotting tracks of the PeopleMover still thread through the land, abandoned; Space Mountain is buried behind an unused 3D theater; the Carousel Theater takes up a whole lot of land to hold the completely embrassing and redundant Star Wars: Launch Bay museum…
Sure, in 2019 (as part of the “Project Stardust” initiative meant to widen Disneyland’s pathways), Disney made a big to-do about finally removing the jagged “Discoveryland” rocks from around the land’s entrance, clearing up some pedestrian bottlenecks. But the concept art they revealed for the “new” entrance (above) still showed the golden, European Astro Orbitor – a weird remnant of ’98 now totally out of sync with the land behind it, which is slowly being restored to its Space Age aesthetic.
So in a weird way, that concept art actually caused more heartbreak than excitement, because it meant that a real, true, large-scale, badly needed complete reimagining of Tomorrowland must not be anywhere in the near future… And if a complete reimagining wasn’t forthcoming in 2019, it would certainly not be anywhere on the horizon post-COVID, right?
And while Disney did remove those rocks and fiddle with the planters at the land’s entrance, they haven’t actually completed the new entry they announced above… Hmmm…
Now, rumors suggest that Disney is ready to return to Tomorrowland, formally launching a New, New, New Tomorrowland for Disneyland, which explains the stop-order on the stopgap fix for the land’s entry. The bad news is that the closer we get to D23, the more insiders suggest that the effort has been pared down. Whereas rumors once insinuated that the land (except for Space Mountain) would essentially be bulldozed and rebuilt from scratch, recent rumblings suggest that this 2020s Tomorrowland might actually amount to a highly-edited rebirth of a shortened PeopleMover, maybe a new restaurant, and some facade work to give the whole land a uniform look and feel.
We’ll tell you right now that if that is the end result of fans’ 25 year wait for a New Tomorrowland in California, Disney won’t be getting many “thank yous.” Of course, given that the substance of Tomorrowland seems unlikely to change from Disney and Pixar animation, maybe a better style really is the best we can hope for… That is, if anything is actually on the docket at all…
3. Avengers Finally Head to Avengers Campus
Opening lands in “phases” seems to be the new hot thing for Disney Parks. It makes some amount of sense – planning to open different elements of a massive project over multiple years takes the pressure off of the construction timeline, spreads expenses over multiple fiscal years, and allows Disney to open elements coinciding with films’ promotional campaigns. That’s why we got Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT! in 2017 with just mere hints that an actual, full Marvel superhero presence would be built around it… eventually.
That word – “eventually” – came into play again when, at the D23 Expo, Bob Chapek formally announced Avengers Campus, but showed two versions of the land’s key artwork… One showing its state when it would open in 2020, and another showing it “eventually,” adding a massive showbuilding housing an Avengers ride. Rumored to be a next-generation, multi-phase “U-Ticket” counterpart to Rise of the Resistance, this ride would be – like the Avengers films – a star-studded crossover event, flying guests from California to Wakanda to join a massive battle.
Of course, this enormous E-Ticket was one of the first projects “paused” during COVID-19, and insiders suggest that it’s not just “paused” anymore – it’s outright cancelled. Yes, reportedly, Disney has pulled the plug on plans for a ride to Wakanda entirely. Naturally, the death of Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman must factor in.
But allegedly, another issue is that the MCU moves so quickly that Disney would be foolish to set a ride back in the timeline and style of the “Infinity Saga” when Iron Man and Steve Rogers and Black Widow would star, since the “Multiverse Saga” is underway (and more to the point, would itself be wrapping up before a ride could even open! (Which, by the way, is maaaaybe why Disney Parks should aspire to more than just bringing to life whatever’s hot at the box office, long-term relevance or in-park fit be damned. But we digress.)
With a downsized budget and far less ambitious leadership, there’s allegedly a “wait and see” attitude around the idea of headlining ride in Avengers Campus; not only to see what’s next for the MCU, but if it’s really needed. (Trust us: it is… not just because the land is definitely lacking its ‘Rise of the Resistance’-sized draw, but because California Adventure needs more E-Tickets.)
Reportedly, what’s in the works now will be much, much less ambitious than the once-planned Avengers ride. At this point, maybe the best we could hope for is an off-the-shelf coaster like Disneyland Paris’ Avengers: Flight Force (itself a retro-fit of the park’s existing Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster), and even that may be far more ambitious than Chapek is thinking.
Either way, it’s especially sad to miss out on the Avengers U-Ticket since whatever Disney chooses to do in the Avengers Campus expansion pad, it’ll fill the last available major expansion pad in California Adventure, “locking in” the park for the foreseeable future. So will we finally hear about an Avengers attraction at the 2022 D23 Expo? And if we do, will it be an impressive one? We’ll find out soon…
4. Something to replace Primeval Whirl
You won’t find too many Disney Parks fans who loved Primeval Whirl – the spinning, carnival-esque family coaster at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Opened in 2002, Primeval Whirl was part of “Chester & Hester’s Dino-Rama.” An attempt to add more family capacity (and frankly, more rides in general) to the then-four-year-old park, Dino-Rama and its traveling carnival aesthetic has remained a frustration for fans for two decades.
Primeval Whirl, meanwhile, has been the source of its own headaches, not the least of which being its connection to two Cast Member deaths in 2007 and 2011, respectively. (The two Primeval Whirl tracks are 2 of 33 identical clones of the ride by a French coaster manufacturer called Reverchon; another of the 33 was responsible for a rider death in the U.K. 2001.)
In June 2019, Disney switched the ride to “seasonal” status (a common death knell for attractions). Then, when Walt Disney World’s parks re-opened during the COVID-19 pandemic in June 2020, Primeval Whirl stayed closed. A month later, Disney representives announced that the ride would never return. For over a year, the vacant coaster sat, looming over a carnival made of a single Dumbo-style spinner and some midway games. In September 2021, demolition finally began.
Today, the plot of land that once housed Primeval Whirl is still empty and surrounded in construction walls. It’s believed that an announcement of its future use could be on the roster for D23 this year. As to what that could be?
A legion of fans have put their money on a copy of Crush’s Coaster at Walt Disney Studios Paris. Given the ride’s proximity to the “Finding Nemo: The Big Blue & Beyond” stage musical, we guess it’s… possible? But why fans would want to replace an off-the-shelf spinning carnival coaster with an indoor off-the-shelf spinning carnival coaster (and in a giant showbuilding at that), we can’t be certain… Especially since the incredibly low-capacity Crush’s Coaster is plagued by multi-hour waits at the diminuitive Walt Disney Studios, so it’s shocking to imagine how long the wait would be at the 6th most-attended theme park on Earth.
Though we did write an in-depth feature on the jaw-dropping and complex backstory of Dinoland (and the controversial “Chester & Hester’s Dino-Rama” traveling fair that serves as its most cringey component), it’s also true that largely, fans are ready to bury Dinoland and think bigger about how to use this section of Animal Kingdom. It’s unlikely that fans’ armchair Imagineered visions of an Indiana Jones land replacing Dinoland outright will come to fruition, and certainly not anytime soon. But at least we’re likely to get a solution to the Primeval Whirl problem.
5. A new Journey into Imagination
For all the pomp and circumstance around EPCOT’s multi-year transformation, there’s been one question looming above all others: what about Journey into Imagination?
In case you’re confused, from 1983 to 1998, EPCOT was home to the Lost Legend: Journey into Imagination – an absolutely incredible, 12-minute dark ride that sent guests into the skies alongside the eccentric, red-bearded Dreamfinder and his inventive sidekick Figment. Journey into Imagination was an epic, abstract, artistic, colorful, and musical trip through the realms of Art, Literature, Science, and Perfomance, teaching guests that every new idea begins as “sparks of inspiration” we collect from the world around us.
In 1999 – in preparation for the park’s Millennium Celebration – the ride was redesigned entirely, cut down to a 6-minute tour of the “Imagination Institute” without Dreamfinder, Figment, or the iconic “One Little Spark” song. The subject of its own Declassified Disaster: Journey into YOUR Imagination lasted just two years before fans practically beat down the doors of Guest Services with torches and pitchforks.
A quick-fix saw the ride turned to its current version – Journey into Imagination With Figment – which keeps the “Imagination Institute” setting, but re-adds a version of Figment and “One Little Spark” throughout. It’s… fine. Like, it’s fine. It’s always a walk-on, pleasant enough for kids, has some cute throwbacks, and a lot of bad 2001 CGI. Two things, though, are totally shocking:
- That this quick-fix, Band-aid version of the ride has actually lasted longer than the beloved original had to begin with;
- That a real reimagining of Journey into Imagination wasn’t the very first thing announced for EPCOT’s reimagining in 2019.
At least in defense of the decision not to have a Journey into Imagination redesign in the first round of EPCOT’s larger effort, we can say that it seemed like a foregone conclusion. The Imagination pavilion was included in the stylized park model in the EPCOT Experience preview center (again, where only pavilions with planned changes were included), and rumors suggested that a Journey into Imagination redesign was almost announced at the 2019 D23, with executives deciding at the last minute to hold it back to be announced at a later date.
Well, that later date has arrived. 2022’s D23 Expo will be held just days before EPCOT’s 40th Anniversary, and it just feels like if one project needs to come back to the drawing board for EPCOT, it just has to be Journey into Imagination. Granted, some insiders have said that executives really, really, really want Pixar’s Inside Out as the “host IP” of the pavilion rather than a return of Dreamfinder and Figment… but with the money Disney makes off of Figment while he’s part of a “just okay” ride, imagine what they could sell if he were the mascot of a really, really good ride again.
What do you think… Do you have your breath held for a new Journey into Imagination to be announced at 2022’s D23? Or do you think Disney’s budget-cut, franchise-focused, Chapek-led era will mean that the current version of the ride continues to limp along while movie-themed rides get the greenlight?
6. Something We Don’t Expect
For all that rumors tend to build in the lead-up to D23 – and for all that fans feel like they have a finger on the pulse of Disney Parks – there’s always a project no one sees coming (and sometimes, that no one wants). Somehow, not one word about Pixar Pier had slipped out before the 2017 D23 Expo. A total shocker that left serious “did that just happen?” energy flowing through the room. In 2019, it was EPCOT’s “neighborhoods” and Disney Genie.
So what will it be this year? Spin the wheel of mis-matched ideas and find out… Zootopia in Animal Kingdom? Wakanda at California Adventure? An Encanto light show at EPCOT? Main Street Electrical Parade moving to Disneyland Paris? Somehow, more E-Tickets in Disneyland?
In any case, D23 Expo has never been more important for Disney Parks fans than it will be in 2022. With COVID, and Chapek, and an Imagineering cut to a fraction of its usual staffing, and currently zero U.S. projects known post-2022, it’s anyone’s guess what we’ll learn this year… One thing we can be sure of? We’re going to be surprised…
