When it comes to thrilling and fun theme park rides, Disney is still the company to beat. In just the last few years, Disney World has seen everything from the groundbreaking Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance to the thrilling Tron: Lightcycle Run. Whatever sort of rides you are looking for, Disney World has some of the best, but there’s one particular type of ride I’m afraid we’ll never see again.
Expedition Everest celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, and the roller coaster is one of my favorite rides in the resort. It’s also likely going to make history because, at this point, it seems all but certain that it will be the last Disney World ride to open not inspired by a Disney franchise.
Expedition Everest Was Walt Disney World’s Last Non-IP Attraction
When Walt Disney first opened Disneyland, the theme park had plenty of rides inspired by the studio’s film output. Fantasyland had multiple dark rides that took guests through the stories from the films. Dumbo alone had two rides in the form of the classic spinner attraction and the Casey Jr. Circus Train.
However, many of the most popular rides at Disneyland in years to come would have no attachment to films. Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion, and Space Mountain were all original concepts with their own stories to tell.
Expedition Everest was already something of an anomaly due to its lack of franchise association when the coaster was built. It has a story that sees guests visiting the Mimalayan Escapes travel company to ride a train through the iconic mountain range. Unfortunately, an interaction with a massive Yeti causes things to go awry.
It’s a great roller coaster with the largest audio-animatronic ever built, even if it’s never worked quite right.
In the years since Everest opened, however, Disney has made a hard pivot toward IP rides, and even seemingly shown contempt for anything that didn’t have a franchise attached to it. In a conversation with Barons back in 2019, then Disney CEO Bob Iger touted all the IP-themed creations coming from Disney and said…
It’s not like I’m going to ride some nondescript coaster somewhere, that maybe is [themed like] India or whatever.
This not-so-veiled shot at Expedition Everest is all one needs to see to know how Disney felt about non-IP rides. Certainly, Bob Iger had no plans to ever build anything like it again.
Franchises Can Still Start With Theme Park Rides
In the years since, we have seen not only rides but entire theme park lands built around a single IP. Lands like Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and World of Frozen are the rule, not the exception. Of all the upcoming Disney World attractions, we're set to see entire lands themed around Cars, Monsters Inc., and Disney Villains
Clearly, we’re never going to get a non-IP attraction when the land the attractions are in has such a theme, but even in places like Disney’s Animal Kingdom’s upcoming Tropical Americas land, which isn’t specifically themed to a franchise, the rides we’re getting are based around Indiana Jones and Encanto.
It’s frustrating because there’s no reason that an original theme park ride can’t also become part of a franchise. Disney’s most successful live-action franchise, not called Marvel or Star Wars, was born from Pirates of the Caribbean. Haunted Mansion and Jungle Cruise have become films as well (to varying degrees of success).
That certainly wasn’t the intention when the rides were built, but why couldn’t it be? While the practice now is to launch a film franchise and then build the theme park ride to go with it, there’s no reason things couldn’t go the other way. Design an incredible theme park ride with a compelling story and fun characters, then expand on it with a movie or a Disney+ series.
There’s always the possibility the media side of the franchise wouldn’t take off, of course, but there’s a reasonably easy way to overcome that. If the ride you make is good enough, nobody will care. Nobody avoids the Haunted Mansion because the movies flopped at the box office. If the ride you make is great, people will ride it and love it, and that love might even help the movie be successful where it otherwise might not.
Disney has a new CEO and a new head of Disney Experiences, so maybe under the new regime, truly original theme park attractions aren’t entirely impossible. I would love to see Walt Disney Imagineering given the freedom that would come with not being forced to tie an attraction to a franchise. Unfortunately, I think that era is over, and it ended with Expedition Everest.
