Disney Studios Paris Park Plan

I want to introduce this post with the disclaimer that this is the first park I have ever designed an expansion plan for without visiting it. I went to Disneyland Paris but skipped the Studios, and I don't regret the decision. But that just means I had to make some educated guesses about how the park works, so there may be some mistakes or issues. Please let me know if there are any glaring problems.

This is by far the most drastic park expansion plan I have ever worked on. It practically was designing a new park because of how little there was to it to start. So the goal of this plan was to create a realistic plan that could actually happen as part of a 15 or 20 year improvement plan. That meant that I needed priorities. From my limited exposure to the park, it seems to me that the biggest challenge is placemaking, as in transforming the lightly themed expanses of concrete to a cohesive Disney quality theme park environment. If I didn't add a single attraction, establishing a quality setting would make a superior park. Luckily I didn't stop there and focused on creating new lands based on highly successful IPs. To be realistic, I limited myself to four lands: Hollywoodland, Pixar Place, Marvel City, and Wonderland, with extensive room for future expansions. To size the park, I also wanted to be realistic. Some elements of the park were dimensioned from the Disneyland Park next door, such as matching the distance from frontgate to hub and matching the maximum walking distance from the gate.

I wanted to mention that I put some research into selecting properties for the park, but may have made mistakes here too. Since I am less familiar with the European market, I researched the France and UK box office for the various properties I considered and used their economic success to gauge what characters would be popular here. This may be completely wrong. Let me know.

Now to the park.

The existing studio entry plaza and Studio 1 remain as the entryway to the park, but that is where the studio theming ends. The Disney Studio area is the transitional gateway to the park with a fully themed Golden Age Hollywood on the other side. Just past the other side of Studio 1 is a semicircular studio archway, marking the transition point between the Hollywood studio and the Hollywood city.

This area took a lot of attempts to develop because of the strange layout of the existing buildings, which I wanted to maintain. The main issue was the inability to implement a hub system because of the proximity of the first buildings to Stage 1. There was no main street corridor to bring you to the center of the park. So the park splits off a little earlier than normal. The priority of this area was placemaking and creating a realistic cityscape, not just a concrete field. So that meant the addition of streets, grass, mid growth trees, and more complex period facades. I also included a streetcar line for the kinetic value. The new plan created a multi axis streetscape based on the existing buildings, with new hub like spaces to the west and south. Straight ahead is the Chinese Theater as a new icon to the park.

Another issue to the layout of the park was the protected old growth forest on the north side of the park (I read about this in a comment on another blog, but have never been able to confirm it. Anyone know for sure if this is protected?). It’s placement in relation to the Pixar additions caused a major flow issue that restricts growth of the park in that direction. To somewhat solve this, there is an enclosed bridge pathway from the Playland area towards the back of the park.

Hollywoodland, the entrance land, includes new period facades on the Animation Building and a new retail building across the street to form a corridor towards the theater. Inside the theater is a small Hollywood history interactive space with a plaza and fountain in front of it. To the south is a new roundabout surrounded by new facades and trees. Cinemagique remains but gets a new entry lobby and façade, adjacent to new retail spaces. The Disney Jr building is rethemed as the high class offices of a Hollywood studio and holds a new original attraction about becoming a movie star. In the attraction queue, guests are interactively cast in the studios newest film before taking a ride through the movie making process as Hollywood’s newest celebrity.

Pixar Place begins just past Stage 1 and is an extremely large land. Each of the unique themed areas tie into a common cityscape design, but each have their own unique touches that reference the property. First, Animagique is replaced with an Up suspended dark ride, which includes Carl’s house out front. The dark ride guides us from take-off in the city to Paradise Falls on a tour led by the Wilderness Explorers. Crush's Coaster is reskinned as a large aquarium, including enclosing the current outdoor section of the ride. It includes an aquarium exhibit space and Turtle Talk on the right side and a counter service location on the left side. Across the street, part of the Animation Building becomes the Pixar Studios, where guests can find meet and greets with rotating characters and a small theater showing Pixar shorts.

Farther down the street, where the costuming building is currently, is an area for the Incredibles, featuring an Omnidroid spinner surrounded by a semicircle of just-smashed facades. Inside the Metroville Bank is a simulator attraction based on the exploits of the super family as they foil a plan by one of the city’s biggest super villains. This would be a unique attraction system with a larger theater capacity, unlike the Star Tours simulators in the other park. The costuming facilities are relocated up the road in a new larger building. Last, Toy Story Playland is completed with a major E ticket attraction behind RC Racer. Instead of just putting Midway Mania here, I wanted to include a new take on a Toy Story shooter attraction. Set inside a giant toy box façade, this is a dual track shooter that is based on physical sets and moving props with minimal screens, including animatronic figures of the significant characters. Guests can choose to play for Buzz or Woody as they travel through Andy’s playroom, encountering scenes based on Buzz’s space background and Woody’s cowboy background. This was the reason that I removed Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters from Disneyland Park.

On the other side of the park is the other major franchise land of the park, Marvel City, which includes areas based on the Star Expo and New York City. Hollywoodland transitions into the Stark Expo along an arcade of trees leading towards the current Rockin Roller Coaster. Filled with futuristic sweeping architecture, the Expo is formed of rethemed existing buildings. Armageddon is rethemed as the Iron Man experience, an animatronic based show that shows the technology and power of Stark’s suit. Rockin Roller Coaster becomes the testing ground of Stark Expo, featuring a high speed flight on the newest Stark creation. And the dining locations are rethemed to the general environment of the technology fair.

Down the street is New York City, a richly detailed big city environment, anchored by the tower of Shield HQ. The city includes a family dark ride based on the Avengers and Shield characters, a major Spiderman suspended attraction that simulated swinging through the city, and a resort highlight Avengers attraction where guests fly along with the Avengers on an effects heavy dark ride coaster. There is also a large counter service location to complete the city.

The west section of the park is divided into three plots, with the outer two saved for expansion. In the center is the Fantasyland style section of the park, meaning a highly vegetated and organic Fantasy based land, which I believe is important to the thematic balance of a Studios park. There were a few possibilities for this, including Avatar and Oz, but based on Box Office results, its upcoming sequel, and uniqueness, I decided on Wonderland from the recent live action franchise. An orderly park transitions from the city to the organic forest of Wonderland. There is a good area of separation here to create the remoteness of the forest. Guests pass under the abandoned gates into the mushroom forest, filled with oversized mushroom canopies and a large carousel. Farther into the forest is the Mad Hatter’s village, including a counter service location and his tea party set up in the shadow of a windmill. This area also has a water based LPS attraction where guests float through the forest spring while trying to avoid the Cheshire Cat’s tricks. At the back of the land is a large boat dark ride through the environment of Alice in Wonderland and a theater with a show hosted by the Queen of Hearts. This theater would likely be removed to access the adjacent expansion plot, so it is a temporary structure.

Expansion pathways are built into this area, connecting the three upper land together and then down to Marvel City. There are a lot of options for expansion so I left them open for now. A likely solution would be for the left plot to become a new Marvel subland and the right plot to be a second Fantasy based land, such as Oz, more Wonderland, or an unknown property, based on the success of future movies.

The plan includes a new parade building behind Stark Expo for a parade that would run from the southeast circle in Hollywoodland, up to the Chinese Theater, and then straight through New York City. Also of note it that I did not include infrastructure for a nighttime experience in this stage of the plan for a few reasons. First, the layout of the park makes it hard to define gathering spaces for an event. There is no natural hub. Also, the scale of the park at this point would probably not require a show, especially since there is the highly successful Dreams just a park away. Last, fireworks would likely require closure of the rear area of the park, which is problematic because that would majorly cut down on the attraction count each day. This growing park can't afford that right now.

So this is step 1 of how this park develops. I plan to make proposals for the expansion plots in the near future, but I am not sure what properties to choose. Any suggestions?

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If you were in charge of selecting properties to include in a studios based theme park, what criteria would you consider to assemble the best lineup? Box office, critical reception, cult popularity, design aesthetic? 

I think my thought process above starts to explain my process: its part box office, part design potential. A popular film in an uninspired visual environment isn't going to get you anywhere. It works better the other direction though. If the design can create a strong enough original environment, the source popularity doesn't matter. But it sure does help to have both.

That leads me to a few franchises that I keep on going back to in parks like this: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Oz, Wonderland, Toontown, Pixar. To an extent Marvel, but the generic urban city is not as suggestive of good environments as others. All of those combine general popularity with superior visual design.