With a global fan base, a passionate following, and billions of dollars worth of films in its quiver, Star Wars isn’t just a major intellectual property: it’s the major intellectual property. And so, when the Walt Disney Company purchased LucasFilm — and the rights to Star Wars — in 2012, it was never in doubt that Disney would use that IP as much as possible.
They rebooted the film franchise, they developed new TV series, they launched new toys and books, and they even created new video games. But, the coup de grace was announced at the D23 Expo in 2015 — by 2019, guests at Disneyland and Walt Disney World would be able to explore a fully-realized theme park land called Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.
So began the transformation of Disney’s Hollywood Studios from just another Walt Disney World park to the home of the most talked about theme park construction project on the face of the earth.
But, it didn’t have to be this way. Yes, Disney’s Hollywood Studios needed some revitalization and, yes, Star Wars needed to come to Walt Disney World in a big way. However, Disney’s Hollywood Studios didn’t need that Star Wars expansion to truly launch itself into the theme park stratosphere. Here are a few reasons why:
Disney’s Hollywood Studios already has its own identity
Image: harshlight, Flickr (license)
From the moment Galaxy’s Edge opens at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in 2019, that park will forever be known as the home of Star Wars on Disney property. Just as Universal’s Islands of Adventure is known, primarily, for Harry Potter, so too will this once storied park lose a piece of its own identity.
And that’s a shame. Guests will rush through the intricately themed Hollywood Boulevard area to make their way to Galaxy’s Edge — waiting in hours-long lines just to get into the land. In doing so, they’ll miss the amazing work Imagineering did capturing the feeling of Tinseltown in the early-to-mid 20th century. The throng of crowds will be so hyper focused, they may even miss the last of the incredible streetmosphere entertainment — characters and scenes created by Imagineering to fill this version of Hollywood with its own cast of wannabe stars and filmmakers.
Star Wars is enough to overpower anything it’s put up against, and with a fully-realized Star Wars land habitating inside another theme park, it’s hard not to feel like the park’s identity will be subsumed by it. The rest of the park — long thought of as a place for thrills and spectacular shows — will be more of a waiting room for guests hoping to journey to a galaxy far, far away.
The park already got a new land
Image: Jaimie Michaels, Flickr (license)
In the mid-2000s, Disney decided to build a high-tech attraction in Disney’s Hollywood Studios that would change the face of an entire section of the park. The result was Toy Story Mania, and its immediate area was rethemed and renamed Pixar Place. At the time, the attraction was seen as a bold push toward interactive theme park experiences, and quickly became popular for its use of beloved Disney characters.
Little did we know then that Disney would soon go all-in on those characters, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit Disney’s Hollywood Studios with an entire themed land devoted to them.
In 2018, Disney opened Toy Story Land — replacing Pixar Place with a more fully-realized area designed to bring to life Pixar’s very first feature film. New attractions themed to Slinky Dog and the Aliens debuted, as well as a new entrance for Toy Story Mania that would reroute traffic directly through the new land.
Unfortunately, Toy Story Land wouldn’t quite live up to the film it draws its name from. Because Galaxy’s Edge was opening up just next door, this section was viewed as more of a value-added area rather than a draw in and of itself. It was decided that, if guests were waiting for hours to get into Galaxy’s Edge, Disney may as well give them something else to do — especially if they’re younger and can’t tackle the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. That makes sense, but it also means that Toy Story Land was viewed as a lower priority for Walt Disney Imagineering.
So, while Toy Story Land is good, it isn’t as great as it could have been had it been given a full investment.
There are other attractions that could have been upgraded
Image: harshlight, Flickr (license)
Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is about to open, and when it does, Disney’s Hollywood Studios will finally return to the days before it became derisively known as a half-day park. And yet, it’s hard not to think those wounds were self-inflicted — and Galaxy’s Edge will simply paper over them, rather than real them.
Think of it like this: When Galaxy’s Edge opens, it will share Disney’s Hollywood Studios with attractions that have been open for decades. Somehow, Indiana Jones: Epic Stunt Spectacular, Beauty and the Beast: Live on Stage, and even Voyage of the Little Mermaid will still be operational as Star Wars opens its doors. For perspective, Indiana Jones: Epic Stunt Specacular opened closer to the premier of Star Wars: A New Hope than to today.
If the company really wanted to give Disney’s Hollywood Studios a makeover, it could have instead rolled out new attractions in the already existing show buildings and areas of the park — giving guests a reason to check out the park beyond a couple of headlining attractions. Star Wars is great, but it will seem somewhat out of place while the rest of the park remains somewhat stuck in the past.
If all else failed, film production could have been brought back
When Disney’s Hollywood Studios began operation in 1989 as Disney-MGM Studios, it had a unique mission: Take guests behind the scenes to see how movies are made. They decided to complete this mission by giving guests a tour of a real production facility Disney would build on-site — half of which would be devoted to live action film, and the other half animation.
For years, the animation studio helped produce some of Disney’s best work, including Aladdin, The Lion King, and Mulan. The live action studio, on the other hand, never quite made the same impact — sitting mostly vacant, save for a few one-off low-budget productions hoping to get a small marketing boost by filming at the Disney park. For most productions, it didn’t make sense to film outside of Los Angeles or other traditional filming locales — why film so far away from where the studio big wigs are?
Eventually, Disney decided the whole thing was more trouble than it was worth and, slowly, shuttered the working studio elements of the property.
Interestingly, right as Disney decided to shut down studio operations, the rest of the world caught up with their idea.
Image: antciardiello, Flickr (license)
In 2006, Disney purchased Pixar — a computer-based animation studio. While the process of couriering animated cells across the country, or scanning them to send digitally, was expensive, time-consuming, and ultimately counterproductive, computer animation would eventually change that equation. Now, teams of animators can, and regularly do, collaborate across vast distances. Even shows like The Simpsons regularly outsource computer animation as far as South Korea — with that perspective, having an animation team in Orlando doesn’t seem so crazy.
In 2008, then-Georgia governor Sonny Perdue signed into law a massive tax incentive — with no end date — that would give film studios that shot large-budget productions in the state of Georgia a break. The gains were so positive that by 2016, more blockbuster movies were shot in Georgia than California. Disney, even, got in on the fun, with most Marvel Cinematic Universe films since Ant-Man in 2015 being shot in the Peach State. It’s not just location shoots either — many productions base their operations out of traditional film studios in the Atlanta area, similar to the facilities Disney built at Disney-MGM Studios in 1989.
Politics aside, it’s not crazy to imagine a world in which Disney used its considerable leverage to get a similar deal granted in Florida. Disney may not have the theme park rights for Marvel attractions east of the Mississippi River, but they could have filmed Marvel movies in their Orlando studio in such a world. They wouldn’t just take guests behind the movie-making process, they’d show them how their actual favorite movies get made. Yes, Star Wars is nice, but a 21st century version of the promise the original Disney-MGM Studios held would be a fantastic way to breathe life into the 30-year-old park.
Plus, if Disney did all of this instead of building Galaxy’s Edge, we could have gotten an entirely Star Wars-themed fifth theme park at Walt Disney World. How cool would that have been?
