Disney’s Star Wars Theme Park Attraction Is the Next Worldbuilding Frontier

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

If it were up to Walt Disney, no one would ever leave his world. Like Howard Stark, a man whose identity the late animator's company now owns, he wanted to create massive, fantastical expos that showed off the possibilities of human innovation. Science fiction builds worlds with words and pictures; Walt Disney did it for real.

In so doing, Disney (the man, not the company) didn’t just illustrate princess castles—he built them. He did it first in Disneyland in Anaheim in the 1950s, then in Orlando's Walt Disney World in the 1970s. But decades later, Disney (the company, not the man) has a lot more worlds to build. A series of shrewd 21st-century acquisitions have given it the rights to the massive comic book world of Marvel; the far, far away galaxy of Lucasfilm; and the animated lands of Pixar. It literally owns so much fictional property, it could never build it all IRL.

But that doesn't mean it's not trying.

Now that all of the studio’s film units are seemingly on blockbuster autopilot, Disney is fully invested in bringing its cinematic universes to its theme parks. The first—and most hotly anticipated—is Star Wars land (as it's commonly but unofficially known), a pair of 14-acre complexes slated to open in 2019 at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. As with all things associated with Lucasfilm, the company is tight-lipped when it comes to specifics about the world, but have promised that it will let people take control of the Millennium Falcon and put themselves in the middle of a battle between the First Order and the Resistance. No one is saying exactly where this face-off will happen, but this week at Disney’s D23 fan event in Anaheim, the company unveiled a large model of the theme park environment and revealed that it will be a place that’s known in the Star Wars universe but has never been on film before. Visitors will find a cantina (naturally), places for rebels to hide, stormtroopers—everything that falls in the Venn diagram where Star Wars movies and theme park trips meet. In other words, get ready for blue milkshakes at every concession stand.

How magical or realistic these spaces end up being—and how immersive it can feel when stormtroopers are walking alongside tourists in flip-flops and tank tops—won’t be known until 2019, but what seems more certain is that this is just the beginning. As sure-fire successful IP gets consolidated into just a few franchises, moving those franchises into other storytelling formats is going to become the next frontier in monetizing them and expanding their reach. Universal's Wizarding World of Harry Potter was only the beginning; Pandora – The World of Avatar opened at Walt Disney World in June, and the D23 Expo this week featured a model of “Mission: Breakout!”—the new Guardians of the Galaxy twist on the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride. And as virtual reality and augmented reality become more of a, well, reality, parks like Disney’s will be able to merge their cinematic and IRL offerings even further.

Even if Walt Disney couldn’t have predicted Star Wars, let alone that his company would one day own it, immersing visitors in his company’s stories and ideas couldn't be more on-brand. Disney didn’t live to see Walt Disney World completed, but before he died he was deeply involved in building it, as well as its “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” (EPCOT). "Disney wanted a community where people really lived," former Disney executive Marty Sklar would say later. In other words, he wanted to build a science fiction world, without the fiction. And now, as D23 visitors are learning, even the fiction is becoming fact.