Disney Parks really are magical, happy places. But ask any fan and they’ll tell you – they’re far from perfect.
Don’t take it from us – Walt agreed! The idea that “Disneyland will never be complete” or the power of “moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things…” It all comes down to the idea that there are always ways to “plus” the parks we love.
Today, we wanted to highlight the one big way we think Disney could bring each of its six U.S. theme parks to the next level. We’re not saying these “fixes” would be easy, but in terms of the path to improve each park, these feel like must-haves. What do you think? What other big, strategic changes would make your favorite theme park a better place to be?
1. Disneyland – Crowd Control
Even if the staunchest Disney World loyalist would have to admit upon stepping through its gates that as a park, Disneyland is pretty perfect. Seriously. In case you haven’t been keeping track like we have, Disneyland Park has more rides, more dark rides, and more E-Tickets than literally any Disney or Universal park, period. We had to stop ourselves at 16 Disneyland Exclusives That Should Make Disney World Fans Jealous, and for those fed up with Disney World’s exhausting emphasis on pre-planning, Disneyland is worth a visit to remember how special a Disney Park can be.
But there is one place where Disneyland majorly fails: crowds. Every Disney Park is crowded. But Disneyland feels crowded. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise. Part of what makes Disneyland so wonderful is its “naivete.” Disneyland’s designers were literally inventing the tenets of the modern “theme park” as they went. To this day, you can see that innocence in the park’s paths. It’s why people describe Disneyland as “charming” and “cozy” and “quaint” compared to Magic Kingdom’s master-planned, mathematical precision. But since about 2005, those “adorable” paths have become more like clogged arteries, with infamous, uncomfortable, and downright unsafe pinch points in New Orleans Square, Tomorrowland, and Adventureland (below).
Ahead of the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, Disney launched “Project Stardust” – a park-wide initiative meant to cut away curbs, reduce planter sizes, and generally try to squeeze any possible square foot out of Disneyland’s paths. On top of that, for the better part of two decades, Disneyland visitors have been crying out for Disney to limit or outright abolish the California resort’s Annual Pass program, to get rid of FastPass that left guests crowding park while waiting for a return time, or even to institute some sort of daily cap that would keep this wonderful park from being overrun every day.
But of course, all three happened in 2021, and Disney swiftly swapped them out for the Magic Key system (essentially, Annual Passes with a new name), upcharge Genie+, and the Park Reservation system (which is obviously in use for some reason, but that reason is definitely not to actually keep crowds to a manageable, enjoyable level because they aren’t). Balancing Disneyland’s relatively large ride capacity with its relatively small physical capacity; its massive revenue potential with its reliance on low-yield locals has been an equation the park can’t seem to solve.
So what can Disneyland do? If you’ve got the answer, tell us. Because so far, even Disney doesn’t seem to be able to figure it out.
2. California Adventure – More E-Tickets
Compared to Disney World’s second, third, and fourth gate, Disney California Adventure actually has a relatively large ride count (with twice as many rides as Hollywood Studios or Animal Kingdom). Of course, a large portion of that comes from the family flat rides in the park’s pier area (a yo-yo swing, a carousel, a parachute tower, a balloon race spinner, a Ferris wheel, and a Golden Zephyr) and the two sizable family rides in Cars Land (Junkyard Jamboree and Rollickin’ Roadsters).
So despite its sizable ride count, California Adventure has about as many E-Tickets as any other non-castle park. A few of those are even significant, one-of-a-kind rides, like Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT! and Radiator Springs Racers. But anyone who’s visited the Disneyland Resort with a multi-day ticket knows that even though it’s a very nice park, California Adventure is still very much in need of more to do… and primarily, more E-Tickets.
Even with the new Avengers Campus, it’s a stretch to call California Adventure a “full-day park,” especially when compared to the original Disneyland across the way. Sure, Disneyland has fifty years on its little sister, and eventually California Adventure will get there…
But for fans who call the California resort home, it’s absolutely flummoxing to figure out why Disney would add Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway to Disneyland – already stuffed with more E-Tickets than any other Disney Park! – instead of putting it in California Adventure’s Hollywoodland where it could do some good. Similarly, it’s shocking that the announced-but-unbuilt Avengers “U-Ticket” wasn’t the very first thing put back into development post-COVID. (Instead, it’s allegedly been canceled altogether, to be replaced by a much smaller and less ambitious ride.)
You can imagine Disney’s frustration. By now, they’ve reportedly spent over $2.5 billion “fixing” a park that cost only $600 million to begin with. In the last two decades, the park has added the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, Monsters Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue, The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, World of Color, Toy Story Midway Mania, Buena Vista Street, Radiator Springs Racers, Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree, Luigi’s Flying Tires and Luigi’s Rollickin’ Roadsters, Soarin’ Around the World, Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT!, and Web-Slingers, so we must sound absolutely insane to be saying more is needed. But seriously… more is needed. (And I have a Blue Sky suggestion!)
3. Magic Kingdom – Something Original
You can discover a lot about a park when you set out to see it in a new way. That’s what led to our Comparing Kingdoms feature, including a unique, hand-drawn, absolutely mesmerizing six-way Venn diagram that compares the ride lineups of all six “Castle Parks” on Earth. One of the most surprising revelations from that diagram is just how unoriginal Magic Kingdom is. It has only five rides that no other Castle Park contains… and two of those rides are duplicated at other resorts (just not in their Castle Park).
At the end of the day, Magic Kingdom’s true, one-of-a-kind exclusives are the Carousel of Progress, the PeopleMover, and Goofy’s Barnstormer. The former two are obviously legends; classics; beloved fan favorites! But if we’re being honest, Magic Kingdom does not have that one-of-a-kind, must-see ride that would draw folks from around the globe.
Think about it: Disneyland has Indiana Jones Adventure and Matterhorn and its historic dark rides. Tokyo has Pooh’s Hunny Hunt and the Enchanted Tale of Beauty and the Beast and Monsters Inc. Ride & Go Seek. Paris has Phantom Manor and Space Mountain. Shanghai has Pirates and TRON and Roaring River. Even little Hong Kong has Mystic Manor and Iron Man Experience and Big Grizzly Mountain.
We get it – Magic Kingdom is Magic Kingdom. It’s the number one most-visited park in the world, and probably will be for a very long time. But in a nutshell, that’s the issue. On one hand, Disney doesn’t feel the need to “plus” Magic Kingdom, because there’s no need to. On the other hand, any capital projects Disney World does greenlight are diverted to its other three theme parks which have far, far fewer rides and need the marketing boost more badly. So, you know, it makes sense.
But a walk through our Possibilityland: Magic Kingdom feature will show you just what a multiversal variant of the Magic Kingdom could be, with Fire Mountain or the Western River Expedition or even an R-Rated Alien ride that would give the park a major personality boost and a much-needed defining ride all its own. It would be nice to see Magic Kingdom evolve away from just being the most-averaged-out Castle Park in Disney’s colllection.
4. EPCOT – A Master Plan
Several generations of today’s theme park aficionados cite EPCOT – to one degree or another – as a pivotal, momentous, defining feature of their lives. EPCOT was like nothing else Disney had ever produced before, and like nothing else it’ll ever produce again. In countless Lost Legends, we’ve explored the origin of EPCOT as something altogether separate from the theme parks it’s often lumped with. Truly a World’s Fair, EPCOT was a fourth-wall-breaking showcase of technologies and corporations and cultures – a brainy, intellectual, international exposition.
So much about the EPCOT formula is just brilliant. Future World, with its pavilions – each focused on a singular topic of science and industry, each anchored by a lengthy, informative dark ride exploring the past, present, and future of its topic area; World Showcase, with its national arranged around a lagoon, serving as cultural and culinary embassies… Those shared pavilion icons; the single design language; the cumulative message…
Of course, it turns out there’s a reason World’s Fairs are impermanent things. Even by the end of the park’s first decade, EPCOT reeked of the decade of its inception, and the park purporting to showcase the “21st century” looked positively retro. Pop culture quickly picked up that EPCOT was a brutal, ‘80s expo marked by lengthy, educational dark rides – a park kids dreaded spending a day at.
To make matters worse, when Michael Eisner became CEO of Disney in 1984, he appeared to have approximately zero idea what to do with the two-year-old albatross he’d inherited in EPCOT. Two decades of piecemeal solutions, shoehorned Disney IP, and a few notoriously bad choices (hello Lost Legends: Journey into Imagination and Horizons) sought to kick EPCOT into high gear. In retrospect, all it did was add pockets of cringey ‘90s choices and short-sighted 2000s thrills to the park, fracturing the very cohesion that had made EPCOT so powerful.
When Disney California Adventure was granted a $1.2 billion, five-year, foundational redesign and expansion in 2007, a chorus of voices sang out in unison that EPCOT needed the same sort of master-planned, all-at-once fix. No more Band-aids. No more piecemeal fixes. A real, true, park-wide refocus.
Well, it’s here. Kinda. Look, absolutely nothing that could happen to EPCOT would ever please everyone. What we’re getting definitely isn’t perfect by any means, and unsurprisingly, EPCOT’s most ardent fans appear to be the least happy. (Despite fans’ armchair Imagineering, there was approximately zero chance that an EPCOT rebuild would ever be character-free.) There’s still a “piecemeal” air to the plan: Disney here, Pixar there, Marvel over there… Some pavilions have a single, centering topic while others don’t. Different aesthetics from different decades clash.
And admittedly, among fans, there’s a sort of general disapproval about plans for the park’s renewed core, and disappointment with the laughable new “neighborhoods” organizing scheme (which probably won’t last a decade). But there’s good, too: the return of a unified visual style and typeface and aesthetic and pavilion icons, and a full-throated embrace of the park’s ‘80s-ness instead of an attempt to bury it.
Unfortunately, EPCOT’s once-in-a-generation chance for a master-planned reimagining was interrupted by COVID, shaving off several announced projects and who-knows-how-many unannounced ones. (Doubtlessly a reimagining of the Imagination pavilion is out there somewhere in the multiverse…) Whether or not you necessarily agree with the direction Disney has decided to take EPCOT, you’ve got to hand it to them: the first time in a very, very long time, at least there appears to be a plan.
5. Hollywood Studios – More C- and D-Tickets
Historically, it makes sense. Hollywood Studios opened with just two rides – the Lost Legends: The Great Movie Ride and the Backstage Studio Tour. Right out the gate, the park proved much more popular than Disney had expected. The race to expand and attract guests to Disney World’s “studio” park has seen many high-profile additions. But weirdly, that’s the issue. With several of Disney World’s most sought-after rides calling Hollywood Studios home, the park has the counterintuitive problem of having too many E-Tickets.
If you take a look at our ride count countdown, you’ll see that Hollywood Studios has about as many rides at EPCOT or Animal Kingdom. The difference is that – if you stick to our E-Ticket Count – literally almost all of them would classify as headliners. Think about it. Of its nine rides, the only one that’s definitely not a major anchor attraction would be Alien Swirling Saucers. You could make an argument that every other ride is “major” enough to be an E-Ticket…
On one hand, that’s great! I mean, Rise of the Resistance, Tower of Terror, Midway Mania, Runaway Railway, Star Tours, Smugglers Run, and Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster in one park? Few lineups can beat it, and certainly a guest looking for iconic rides will get their money’s worth at Hollywood Studios.
But the problem is that parks need supporting rides, too. Even low-capacity rides can add up. The Dumbos and Autopias and Tom Sawyer Islands and Space Ranger Spins and Gran Fiesta Tours and Astro Orbitors and Laugh Floors and Journey into Imaginations of the world have an important purpose. Together, they add enormous capacity to a park. They act like sponges, giving guests something to do (and just as importantly, somewhere to be) while they wait for Lightning Lane return times.
Without them, Hollywood Studios guests just cram into queues for the E-Tickets (which, remember, is almost everything). Those same queues, remember, are being slowed immensely by Genie+, whose “Lightning Lane” guests are reportedly given 9-to-1 preference over Standby guests at peak times, turning the Standby lines into multi-hour crawls. That’s why Hollywood Studios wait times leap past the hour mark upon opening, and then tend to stay there all day, every day. Seriously, go check the app now and you’ll almost certainly see Slinky Dog, Smugglers Run, Rise, Tower of Terror, Runaway Railway, Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, and Midway Mania all at an hour or more.
It sounds counterintuitive to say that just adding family flat rides and spinners and continuous animatronic shows and “filler rides” would help solve what plagues Hollywood Studios, but while you’re in the app, zoom over to Magic Kingdom. Though Magic Kingdom hosts many more guests each year than Hollywood Studios, they’re distributed among many more rides – including lots of “supporting” attractions! – meaning even E-Tickets tend to have Standby waits under an hour.
6. Animal Kingdom – More Rides
Anyone who’s been to Animal Kingdom will tell you the one, singular problem with the park: it has practically no rides. Like Hollywood Studios, Animal Kingdom opened with just two – the headlining Kilimanjaro Safaris and the terrifying Lost Legend: Countdown to Extinction. But even more than two decades later, a visit to the park doesn’t have many more rides to speak of.
Sure, we’ve seen the addition of Kali River Rapids, two (now reduced to one) capacity-building family carnival rides in Dinoland; Expedition Everest; and now, Na’vi River Journey and Avatar Flight of Passage. But we’re still talking about a park with just eight total rides – the lowest count of any Disney or Universal Park on Earth. (It’s almost unthinkable that a day at Animal Kingdom cost $100 before Pandora. Yikes.)
Yes, of course, Animal Kingdom makes up for its dearth of rides by supplying lots of animal experiences, countless impromptu entertainment experiences, and three top bill shows. But even now – decades after its opening – it would be difficult to classify Animal Kingdom as anything but a “half day park.” It simply needs more to do. A “Cars Land” scaled expansion (with one anchoring E-Ticket and two very large family flat rides) would be great; two expansions like that would be even better. And even that would really just be a start.
There’s no question that Pandora – The World of Avatar made Animal Kingdom an unmissable, unskippable park. So the question now becomes how to keep people there. And while animal experiences and shows are an inseparable part of the Animal Kingdom experience, there’s just no denying that the thing this park needs is more rides. Period.
