ANAHEIM, CA – For those of you who couldn’t make it out here and instead spent last night playing Disney-Predictions-Bingo with a tub of ice cream parked next to the couch, at least Disney finally let us watch live. Horizons: A Carousel of Progress streamed on Disney+ for the first time ever, and it delivered pretty much everything you’d want from that setup. Neil Patrick Harris spent two hours doing his best Carousel of Progress bit (perhaps to smooth the pain over), and by the time the lights came up, Disney had unloaded more Walt Disney World news than any panel in recent memory. Villains Land finally got a “real” name and two headline rides. Monstropolis is opening (sort of) in 2027. EPCOT is getting Figment and Dreamfinder back together, and Spaceship Earth is finally getting touched for the first time in almost twenty years. Piston Peak got new concept art. Carousel of Progress itself is getting Jamie Lee Curtis and Bryan Cranston reading Mom and Dad’s lines starting next spring.
It’s a lot. It’s also the first Horizons under Thomas Mazloum, who took over as Disney Experiences Chairman back in March after Josh D’Amaro got bumped up to CEO of the entire company, which, if you’ve been reading us for a while, is exactly the promotion we flagged as inevitable once the pressure from Epic Universe started actually showing up in Disney’s numbers. So it’s worth asking the obvious question before diving into any of the individual rides: does last night change anything for Universal?
Short answer, mostly no, at least not yet. Longer answer below.
Start with the one that actually matters for thrill-seekers: Monstropolis. Disney confirmed portions of the Monsters, Inc. land will open at Hollywood Studios in 2027, complete with the Glob Theater show, Harryhausen’s restaurant, and a Randy Newman song nobody asked for but everybody’s going to have stuck in their head (giving him the spotlight again after he shared it for Toy Story 5 w/ Taylor Swift). The headline attraction, a suspended coaster that lifts riders 40 feet into the air in four seconds before sending them through the door vault, does not have an opening date attached to it. Disney was extremely careful with that language last night. “Parts of Monstropolis” open in 2027. The coaster comes later, unspecified. That’s the same phased-opening playbook we’ve watched Disney run with Galaxy’s Edge. If you’re timing your next trip around riding Disney’s first suspended coaster, you’re going to be waiting past 2027 regardless of what the marketing makes it sound like.
Villains Land is further behind than Monstropolis, structurally. We got a name, a Maleficent coaster through her briar-covered fortress, and a Magic Mirror dark ride into a mirror realm full of other villains (which seems like it exists solely to get ahead of Universal’s unannounced Creature of the Black Lagoon ride coming to Dark Universe). What we did not get, again, was a date. Not a year or even general estimation. Disney compared the land’s scale to Galaxy’s Edge, which is a real statement of ambition, but Galaxy’s Edge also took the better part of a decade from first reveal to opening day, and Villains Land is still sitting at the concept-art-and-a-name stage. If Universal’s timeline for its own Phase 2 holds anywhere close to what permits currently suggest, there’s a real chance Epic Universe adds multiple entirely new E-ticket attractions before Villains Land even opens its gates at all (and that’s not even counting IOA or USF, both of which are getting additions in the coming years).
Piston Peak, the Cars-themed expansion, barely moved. New concept art for Ridge Run Rally and a still-unbuilt second attraction called Miss Fritter’s Daredevil Spin-Along. No walls up yet that anyone’s tracking, no permits of consequence. This is a project that’s still years out, and last night’s reveal read more like Disney reassuring investors/shareholders the project is alive rather than a construction update.
Tropical Americas is the one genuinely new piece of information out of last night, and it’s still not a Universal problem either. Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent sounds legitimately impressive on paper, a massive hand-sculpted animatronic serpent and the first Harrison Ford AA figure Disney’s ever built, alongside an Encanto attraction and a family carousel. None of it has a date attached. None of it is a thrill ride in the way Universal counts thrill rides. Animal Kingdom is just expanding its own lane.
The genuinely interesting stuff, honestly, is happening at EPCOT and it has nothing to do with competing head-on with Universal. Spaceship Earth’s first real overhaul in two decades and the Figment/Dreamfinder reunion are both nostalgia plays aimed at an entirely different customer than the one buying a Stardust Racers Express Pass. Universal doesn’t really have an answer to a park like EPCOT because Universal isn’t trying to be EPCOT. Different audience, different trip, different day of the vacation.
So where does that leave things? Disney spent last night proving it has an enormous revamping pipeline and basically no urgency attached to any of it. Every single headline attraction announced, Villains Land’s two rides, Monstropolis’s door coaster, came with either no date or a deliberately vague one. Compare that to Universal, which just this past week finished building the actual physical track for Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift in Orlando.
Disney can absolutely out-imagine Universal on any given night in Anaheim. What last night didn’t show is anyone at Disney willing to commit to a date the way Universal has been forced to since Epic Universe opened and the comparisons started writing themselves. Blue-sky without a date isn’t anything. It’s also NOT a rival attraction anyone’s riding this decade.
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