When Marvel’s Avengers Campus opens at Disneyland on July 18, 2020, it will boast one brand new ride (in addition to the preexisting Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout) – one that doesn’t focus on any member of the core Avengers team like Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Thor, or Hulk, but instead showcases a Marvel character with a particularly complicated backstory: Spider-Man.
The Wall-Crawler will be a star attraction throughout Avengers Campus; Disney just confirmed that Tom Holland will be reprising his big-screen role as Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the new ride, WEB Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure, which will open the same day the new theme park area does. The character will also anchor a merchandise hub and a meet and greet opportunity, and he’ll be visible – in what we’re guessing is “stuntronic” robot form, although Disney declined to confirm it – performing aerial feats above Avengers Campus.
Watch Spider-Man in action at Avengers Campus below:
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But Holland’s involvement wasn’t always such a sure thing. Our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man had a tumultuous 2019, with Marvel and Sony locked in a very public tug-of-war over whether Spidey would appear in movies connected to the MCU moving forward, given that Sony Pictures still owns the theatrical rights to the character. Luckily, the two sides reached a new deal (thanks, in part, to some superheroics from Holland), and the future looks bright for the webhead.
Spider-Man is expected to feature in some capacity (even if he’s just referenced in passing) in Sony’s Morbius, which established that it is somehow connected to Holland’s Spider-Man movies, and thus the wider MCU, in its most recent trailer. Sony has also confirmed that a third Holland Spider-Man movie is in the works, with Marvel’s Kevin Feige set to produce. So as of right now, Sony and Marvel’s relationship seems perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
But Spider-Man has another preexisting licensing deal that adds a further tangle to the web; the character already has a theme park ride at Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando – The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, which opened in 1999. Universal licensed the rights to use several major Marvel characters in its theme parks back in the ’90s, long before Disney acquired the Marvel comic book publishing empire in 2009.
Universal still holds those licenses (and will for as long as the company continues paying royalties to Marvel), and the deal prevents Disney from utilizing any Marvel characters that Universal is using – including Spider-Man, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men – in any theme parks “East of the Mississippi.” Characters that aren’t currently featured at Universal’s parks are fair game for Disney in Florida – which is why the Guardians of the Galaxy are headlining an ambitious new rollercoaster, Cosmic Rewind, at Epcot, slated to open in 2021.
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West of the Mississippi, according to the contract, any Marvel characters are up for grabs (hence the stacked lineup of heroes being assembled for Avengers Campus), although Disney is still prohibited from using the “Marvel” name as part of any attraction’s name or in the marketing. That’s why Avengers Campus isn’t being branded “Marvel’s Avengers Campus” or “Marvel Land” at Disneyland.
Disney is also opening Avengers Campus outposts at Hong Kong Disneyland and Disneyland Paris where Universal’s licensing rights don’t apply – Hong Kong Disneyland already features an Iron Man Experience within a Stark Expo hub in Tomorrowland, and the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Nano Battle ride, which is a reskin of Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters. Disneyland Paris will also get the WEB Slingers ride, and an Iron Man-themed rollercoaster that will replace Aerosmith’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster. All three parks will also feature an elaborate Avengers E-ticket ride that is being planned for “Phase 2” of the expansion at some point after the land opens.
While it’s a rare occurrence for two theme park rides to be produced around the same property by two different companies, Walt Disney Imagineering’s Executive Creative Director Brent Strong told press that Disney wasn’t too concerned about competing with anyone, given how immersive the WEB Slinger ride – and Avengers Campus as a whole – promises to be.
“We sought to make the best story we could make within our world. We really made sure that we were just leveraging everything that we had in terms of the technology, in terms of guest engagement,” Strong told reporters at a recent press preview for Avengers Campus. “One of the things that’s really important to Imagineering is creating these compelling, immersive, connected lands … The Spider-Man attraction here isn’t just ‘the Spider-Man attraction,’ it’s part of Avengers Campus.”
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The storyline of the ride will see guests helping Spider-Man to capture an army of rogue Spider-Bots who are threatening to escape into the rest of the Campus, playing up the ride’s connection to its surroundings and the heroes that populate this world. “So even in the course of this Spider-Man adventure, it’s really a Spider-Man adventure in Avengers Campus,” Strong said. “And I think that because we have this connected, integrated story, the comparisons sort of start to fall away. It becomes its own thing.”
The Disney Imagineers note that Spider-Man was an appealing anchor for the new ride because he’s a relatable character for guests of all ages – which was particularly important considering that the experience won’t have any height restrictions that might stop younger guests from participating. Spider-Man is optimistic, enthusiastic, and aspirational, often struggling with how to juggle his personal life with his superhero responsibilities, which lent itself to an attraction that didn’t rely on a specific supervillain as an obstacle.
“One of the things that we loved about Peter Parker and that we thought was so classic is that so often he is his own foe, right? Not in the literal sense, but in that idea that part of what makes Spider-Man such a relatable character that he is balancing being a superhero with being a student, with romance,” Strong said. “He always has too many plates spinning and this idea that the adventure unfolds because he has too many plates spinning was just such a great way to bring that character to life. And the Spider-Bots also provided us a great avenue into comedic mischief, into mayhem, which is perfect for a family attraction.”
The driving force behind the design of WEB Slingers as a ride was the desire to “give every single guest the feeling of being a hero, going on a mission and not just being present, but being very active in it,” Strong explained, revealing that his background in game design helped him figure out how to bring the interactive attraction to life.
The ride uses a proprietary motion tracking system that has taken the Imagineers more than two years to develop, in order to allow guests to look as if they’re shooting webs from their wrists in a 3D environment.”When we really started to look at what was out there, nothing solved our particular challenges of this needing to work for four people sitting very close together in a darkened environment, all ages, all ethnicities. It had to work in these amazing circumstances,” Strong said.
The ride cars will move through physical sets that also utilize virtual media and 3D images (including the experience of shooting webs to interact with a computer-generated backdrop), combining for an attraction that Strong hopes will prove totally immersive.
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“There is dimensional life to each of these environments that we take you into as well as [those] that blend into the virtual,” Strong said. “Honestly, even if you sit on your hands and choose not to interact, we are telling a complete story from beginning to end. There is still very much a story of Spider-Man saving the Campus and needing your help along the way. So even if you just choose to sit back and watch, there’s a lot to see. That being said, I hope most people try it out.”
As for how the Imagineers made the story of WEB Slingers unique for fans after decades of Spider-Man stories, Strong revealed, “It was finding that balance of representing all of the aspects of the character that make him timeless and aspirational … being youthful, learning his ways as a superhero, balancing too many things, having that responsibility, but also figuring out how to put a new spin on it, how to make sure that this doesn’t just feel like the retelling of any of the hundreds of stories that have been told before but really felt like something new.
“To me, what felt great is the moment that it was about bringing our guests in, the moment that it was about Spider-Man and Peter Parker welcoming all of us into the Worldwide Engineering Brigade. That’s something that you’ve never seen before in any other medium is actually being invited along on the journey. And so that was where I felt great that we had everything that was classic about the character, but this new ingredient that allowed us to tell all this story.”
You can experience WEB Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure for yourself when Avengers Campus opens on July 18, 2020 at Disney’s California Adventure Park in Anaheim.
Source: IGN.com Here's How Disneyland Can Use Tom Holland's Spider-Man Despite Those Rights Issues