We’ve had plenty of warning signs that the current management of the Disney brand doesn’t understand or appreciate their roles as stewards of priceless Americana.
For the last few years, the current decision makers at Disney have been carrying on as if they’re running a shopping mall and not a national treasure.
Obsessed with floating other divisions of the Walt Disney Company instead of tending to the fragile creative ecosystem that makes Disney so eternally beloved, the Disney parks have been forcing out long-serving staff members and their institutional knowledge, bleeding devoted customers with skyrocketing prices and fees, renovating heritage properties with dull contemporary trends, shutting down entire parks for months at a time, neglecting maintenance, and constructing new resorts that feel like cookie-cutter corporate chains rather than the thematic fantasias that earned Disney its position as a vacation champion.
But what the company announced last Saturday should leave no doubt: At Disney, the pirates have taken over Walt’s kingdom.
Disney’s deceptive announcement at D23 Expo
Every 2 years, Disney uses the convention it throws for its most devoted fans, the D23 Expo, to tease upcoming projects to an adoring crowd. The previous conventions, in 2022 and 2019, disappointed die-hards by announcing major projects that weren’t actually greenlit, had no budget, and never came true.
But this past weekend, as Comcast’s Universal Epic Universe park nears completion a few miles from the Walt Disney World resort in Orlando, Disney knew it had to announce something real this time.
“Pixar Animation Studios’ beloved Cars franchise is coming to a reimagined area of Frontierland,” Disney revealed vaguely, referring to Magic Kingdom, the most-visited theme park in the world.
What Disney neglected to tell fans, no doubt intentionally, was that in order to carry out this project the company will bulldoze a massive original section of the park—and soon.
The Rivers of America, Tom Sawyer Island, and the Liberty Square Riverboat—all elements original to Magic Kingdom’s 1971 opening and a basic building block of Disney’s castle parks worldwide for half a century—will be demolished.
When will Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer Island close?
“Construction on this area will begin early next year [2025],” Disney told fans.
Disney didn’t say exactly when, so it’s hard to tell travelers when to plan vacations to say goodbye to this essential panorama of American childhood, but early permits were filed on Monday.
Disney World also hasn’t given reasons for destroying the Rivers of America when there’s so much room elsewhere. In fact, the company hasn’t even explicitly acknowledged the amputation, preferring to ride a wave of deceptively positive coverage of “expansion” by journalists who don’t realize what the announcement will really entail.
After the initial excited news headlines died down, Disney released a rendering of the project (pictured above) that shows the true eradication that’s coming. As leakers inside the company have confirmed, the placement of the Cars section in Frontierland will obliterate the famous riverboat, the island, and its industry-leading panorama. Below, see the current view of the same area on Google Earth.
By mid-2025, while Comcast’s new, cutting-edge Epic Universe park is opening to a barrage of global coverage, Magic Kingdom will be filling one of its most emblematic vistas with dirt.
It seems unthinkable that a Disney executive could even consider this.
To longtime Disney devotees, this is a desecration, demonstrating a corporate blindness to what makes Disney Disney. Rivers of America, or a similar loop of water rambling past old-timey storefronts, is a core feature of all original Disney parks, as elemental as a Main Street, old-style trains, and the castle at the center. Walt Disney and his wife Lillian loved the riverboat—they even spent their 30th anniversary aboard the one inside the Disneyland park (pictured below).
To fill in the lagoon and replace it with concrete and asphalt degrades the iconic scenic and architectural alphabet of the great Disney parks.
Even Disney seems to know this. The company’s assurance that “guests will have plenty of time to experience the charm and nostalgia of Frontierland as it is today” all but acknowledges that charm and nostalgia are about to go into the wood chipper.
The replacement dishonors the conceit of Magic Kingdom, too, which was intended in part to preserve an idealized version of the United States that was lost to rampant development and urbanization. Now Disney itself has become the agent of heedless progress, replacing the carefully curated steamships that defined our nation with talking cars.
To destroy a fundamental feature for a movie franchise that Disney itself didn’t even create—the company acquired Pixar in 2006, the year Cars was released—makes Magic Kingdom a weakly conceived mishmash of passing notions just like any other theme park.
Magic Kingdom and its forebear, Disneyland, are structured around ageless imagination-sparking concepts—Frontierland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland. Not movie franchises, like a Disney+ watch list.
Why is Disney demolishing Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer Island?
Why would Disney choose to do something like this when they could simply expand into the tens of thousands of acres the company owns in Florida? Disney hasn’t said.
“Here in Florida, we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland: the blessing of size. There’s enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine.”
That’s how Walt Disney sold the public on his upcoming Orlando theme park in 1966, weeks before his death.
What’s the public reaction today?
“Disneyland was able to add a huge expansion [when it added Galaxy’s Edge], rework the river, and mostly keep the experiences the same, yet WDW has the blessing of size?” one guest posted on social media.
“I cannot understand this company’s thinking. What’s the point of having ‘blessing of size’ if you don’t use it,” wrote another.
“With this transformation, Disney is opening the unspeakable door of allowing Universal to directly compete with them,” wrote Disney Glimpses. “Prior to this, Disney World, specifically the Magic Kingdom, was a unique force that could not be beat. Everything changes today.”
“Universal DESERVES to eat your lunch and leave you in rubble. Imbeciles,” wrote WDWPro.
Online, it’s Disney fan against Disney fan, as die-hards clash with younger consumers who don’t understand the damage to brand identity and nostalgia heralded by the changes.
While it’s true that Tom Sawyer Island has relatively low guest visitorship compared to other attractions, that shouldn’t make its removal inevitable. This doesn’t have to be framed as a choice. At Disneyland Paris, the island at the center of its own river loop is used for the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad coaster, which boards on shore but travels via tunnels to the island for its main course. Cars could do something similar. Or why couldn’t Disney simply let the Cars franchise replace the Tomorrowland Speedway—a barren, noisy, smelly go-kart track on the other side of the park that already has a vehicular theme?
If the answer is that the Rivers of America is costly to maintain (another body of water at Magic Kingdom, the lagoon for the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine ride, was expensive to operate in the swampy Florida ecosystem and filled in by 2004), then that would define this radical move as a cost-cutting measure.
It’s worth nothing that no other Disney park around the world has filled their bodies of water in. In fact, it was announced a D23 Expo that Paris’ Disney Adventure World park will be adding a lagoon.
Another thing worth mentioning in light of cost-cutting excuses: Last week Disney reported $2.2 billion in quarterly profits in its parks division.
What’s next? Disney World without a castle? No Main Street?
Don’t laugh—nothing is sacred at Disney anymore. The Walt Disney Company invokes Walt Disney’s name and quality standards repeatedly for market manipulation, and the company is even installing a Robot Walt to inculcate his cultlike following with his forgotten standards at Disneyland. But the last 20 years have proven again and again that the company finds Walt’s values optional, not foundational.
Disney’s C-suite pirate crew is all too willing to sweep aside Walt’s innovations and meticulous placemaking—the very things that made the world fall in love with Disney parks—if it’ll save them an extra dollar that can go to the umpteenth Marvel sequel or pay an actor $80 million to accept a movie role.
For the crop of executives now strip-mining the venerable Disney identity and sense of place for short-term profit, anything is fair game.
Old Disney is dead. The Golden Era is over.
The pirates are in charge now.
