A New Avatar Experience Is Coming To Disneyland – But What Does That Mean?
A theme park attraction can't just have a successful opening weekend, like a movie. This is something that needs to be built to last for decades that will hopefully never wain in popularity. For Disney in recent years, that has meant looking to their various intellectual properties for inspiration. Once they acquired Lucasfilm, "Star Wars" was going into the theme parks without question. Same goes for Marvel, once they could figure out how Universal's Florida theme park rights affected things. Plus, they have a library of generational animated classics to work with.
One of their more unusual and quickest turnarounds in recent years was Pandora — The World of "Avatar" at Animal Kingdom in Disney World. At the time of this deal, Disney did not yet own what was then 20th Century Fox, so this was a licensing deal to use James Cameron's alien world in their parks. Principally designed by the great Imagineer Joe Rohde, the planning for this land began back in 2011 and eventually opened in 2017, which was a time where many wondered if people even cared about "Avatar" anymore. It was a rousing success and a genuine feat of theming and innovation. The E-ticket attraction "Flight of Passage" is truly one of the most dazzling rides I've ever been on.
Now, Disney owns the re-named 20th Century Studios, which means they own "Avatar." As the $2.1 billion box office for "Avatar: The Way of Water" has shown, this is something everyone is still into. So, on a Disney investors call, newly reappointed CEO Bob Iger announced more "Avatar" will be headed to the parks, this time at Disneyland. Details are incredibly light, just being described as an "Avatar experience." So, you know what that means? Let's wildly speculate on what it could be!
Where could it be?
Disney World in Orlando spans about 25,000 acres of land, only about half of which has been developed. Disneyland Resort in California, where the new "Avatar" experience will be located, only sits on 160 acres. That means finding new space to accommodate whatever this attraction, land, or experience ends up being is incredibly difficult. Pandora — The World of "Avatar" in Animal Kingdom itself takes up 12 acres, so the chances of them cloning that land in California are slim.
If they want to find space for "Avatar" where they don't have to close down and remake something already in the parks, I imagine the best place for it would be in the proposed DisneylandForward expansion that the company announced a couple of years ago that really hasn't progressed since. This would involve developing new park space on the other side of a street that would require park goers to cross some kind of bridge to enter. In terms of theming, I find this to be the best solution. Nothing at Disneyland or California Adventure remotely resembles "Avatar," and finding some kind of aesthetic transition between the two would be incredibly difficult, especially in Disneyland proper. Having it being completely isolated on the other side of a street would be the theme park equivalent of going to an alien planet.
Of course, we have no idea whether this Disneyland Forward initiative will even amount to anything and whether or not this land is on the table. More than likely, "Avatar" will be replacing something already at the park, most of which is sacrosanct for park fans. If that's the case, there's not a lot of options as to where it makes sense.
Go big or go home
My one major worry about putting "Avatar" into a place with limited space is that it will end up being just a single attraction. If this proves to be some kind of 4D attraction that they just shove into the theater that now houses Mickey's PhilharMagic at California Adventure, that will be both a disservice to the creative possibilities of "Avatar" and a total failure of theming. This is not an easy thing to utilize as a plug-and-play attraction.
The reason the "Avatar" films and the land at Animal Kingdom are so successful basically boil down to one thing: immersion. People keep going back again and again to see those movies in the theater because they don't want to leave the world of Pandora, and Animal Kingdom actually allows them to live out that fantasy, complete with an attraction that lets you ride a mighty ikran. If Disney feels the need to include "Avatar" on the west coast, they can't skimp out on the immersion. Otherwise, there really is no point in doing it.
My large scale guess
I'm going to predict what "Avatar" at Disneyland will be, and my prediction is sure to upset a lot of park fans. This is not what I would do in the park. If it were up to me, I would prioritize getting that DisneylandForward space to build an immersive land based on the Metkayina's reef setting from "The Way of Water" or of one of the environments from a future sequel, making it a distinct entity from the land at Animal Kingdom. But I don't fully buy that happening.
My guess for what this could be means saying goodbye to the Grizzly Peak land from Disney's California Adventure, thus putting the final nail in the coffin of the original California theming for that park. In its place would be essentially a clone of Animal Kingdom's Pandora. Not only is the land already filled with an abundance of greenery, but the land's E-ticket attraction, Soarin' Around the World, already houses the giant screens necessary to transform it into the Flight of Passage attraction.The Grizzly River Run rapids ride also gives the Imagineers the opportunity to come up with a fun water-based thrill ride centered on "Avatar: The Way of Water."
Over the last decade or so, California Adventure has seen major overhauls towards dedicated lands based on intellectual properties. That started with Cars Land, and now there's Pixar Pier and Avengers Campus. The park's name hasn't been accurate for a long time, and maybe adding "Avatar" would finally get them to change it to something more akin to Disney's Hollywood Studios in Orlando. I would hate to see Soarin' go too (though it's still at EPCOT), but if they want to do right by "Avatar," this is my best guess as to how they'll do it.