Disney Expected To Announce New Theme Park

Shanghai Disneyland Resort may be announcing a second theme park as part of its 10th anniversary celebrations.

MSM

Disney is tipped to imminently announce that it is developing a new theme park as part of a $60 billion investment in its Experiences division which generates the majority of its operating income.

It is widely expected that the park will be built in Shanghai alongside its existing fairytale-themed outpost there and the announcement could come as early as next week.

Tomorrow the resort will begin two days of celebrations to mark its tenth anniversary with Disney’s chief executive Josh D’Amaro flying in for the festivities. The invitation received by this author doesn’t refer to an announcement and simply invites media to “join us to celebrate ten years of making magic together.” However, there will be plenty of opportunity for an announcement to be made.

The festivities will begin tomorrow afternoon with a media session which will showcase highlights from the past decade at the resort and provide the updates about the latest developments, according to the organizers. The media event will be followed by a red-carpet celebration with the highlight taking place in the evening in front of the park’s soaring Enchanted Storybook Castle. It will be the backdrop for live performances by Disney characters and an anniversary fireworks celebration.

The party will continue on Tuesday morning with a special birthday moment for park guests in front of the castle which is the tallest in any Disney park and the only one to contain a boat ride. That’s far from the only difference with its counterparts around the world.

Disney’s former chief executive Bob Iger famously described the park as “authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese.” It is no exaggeration. Instead of creating a carbon-copy of Disney’s American theme parks, its designers, who are known as Imagineers due to their imaginative use of engineering, tailored the Shanghai site to the local market. Everything was customized, from the park’s layout and attraction lineup right down to its wide range of Chinese food.

Unlike all of Disney’s other so-called castle parks, Shanghai has no turn-of-the-century themed Main Street running from the entrance to its centerpiece castle. In place of this slice of Americana is the cartoony Mickey Avenue which is themed to classic capers featuring Disney’s mascot. Likewise, there is no steam train or Haunted Mansion as you usually find in Disney’s castle parks. The railroad got cut to maximize walking spaces while the Haunted Mansion was removed out of respect for Chinese cultural sensitivities regarding death and spirits.

The clearest nod to the local audience is right in the middle of the park which is usually paved. Instead, Shanghai Disney is home to the grassy Garden of the Twelve Friends with 12 massive mosaic murals of classic Disney characters in the form of Chinese Zodiac animals. It took more than the wave of a magic wand to pull it off according to Jim Shull, a former Imagineer who worked on Shanghai Disney. Shull is one of the most skilled artists to have ever worked at Imagineering and went on to found the Disney Journey YouTube channel.

He says that China’s state-owned Shanghai Shendi Group, which is a 57% shareholder in the resort, “set up meetings and focus groups and opportunities to tour” the city so that the Imagineers could find out about local culture. He adds that “at the same time, you try to live there, if you can, and kind of soak up the environment to understand what the locals value. It’s not just researching, it’s taking the research, analysing and understanding it, talking to locals, engaging with locals and understanding what their values are and what is important.”

No expense was spared and the resort cost an estimated $6 billion to build. Disney didn’t even cut corners on the invitation to the opening event which this author received in 2016. Presented in a large royal blue box, the invitation followed the format of a Russian nesting doll as it contained layers which, in turn, held more layers. Each one had concept art in it for the lands in the park and the images looked so impressive that Imagineering recently posted it on Instagram in advance of the anniversary.

The blockbuster spending paid off as Shanghai Disney welcomed its 100 millionth guest in November last year and it isn’t stopping there. According to the latest data from the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA), in 2024 the park’s attendance rose 5% to 14.7 million. Disney owns 43% of the resort with the remainder in Shendi’s hands. In contrast, Disney controls the resort’s management company with a 70% stake and 30% owned by Shendi.

Disney is paid royalties based on the resort’s revenues though it doesn’t disclose the performance of individual parks in its filings. It lifted the curtain a little towards the end of the pandemic when it revealed that Shanghai Disney had record revenue, operating income and margins in the third quarter of 2023 and experienced the highest year-on-year operating income growth of all of its international sites. It is now the world’s fifth most-visited theme park according to the TEA though it is facing stiff local competition.

In 2005 none of the 25 most-visited parks worldwide were in China but the country was home to six of them by 2024 according to the TEA. The local landscape in Shanghai is also getting even more crowded with a branch of the wildly-successful tour behind the scenes of the Harry Potter movies set to open there next year. Disney’s arch-rival Universal opened a theme park in nearby Beijing in September 2021 and it already has the 12th highest attendance in the world with visitor numbers rising 8.6% to 9.8 million in 2024 according to the TEA.

To compete, Shanghai Disney opened an immersive land themed to the hit animated movie Zootopia in December 2023 and it is now building a Spider-Man roller coaster. Two new hotels are also in development suggesting that the resort is preparing for a lot more visitors.

“Likely a second park is coming to Shanghai Disneyland to open around the 15th anniversary” says Shull. Rumours about the park have been widely discussed in theme park circles online for months and it is believed to be codenamed Project Atlas.

Initially thought to be science-themed, it is now said that the park will instead feature immersive lands based on local favorite films and franchises such as Avatar, Marvel and Moana.

If Disney does indeed announce the new park it will be the second in as many years as the studio revealed in May 2025 that a Disneyland will also be coming to Abu Dhabi. There is good reason for this desire to expand.

Theme parks sit inside Disney’s Experiences division which generated 57% of its $17.6 billion operating income last year and nearly 40% of its $94.4 billion revenue. In an attempt to drive this even higher, Disney announced in September 2023 that it would invest $60 billion in Experiences over the next decade with its theme parks getting around half of the total and the remainder spent on its cruise line as well as maintenance and technology upgrades. It added that it has more than 1,000 acres of land for possible future development which is the equivalent of around seven new Disneyland parks.

Building a second park in China is a no-brainer and not just because of the success of its existing site. Last week the World Travel & Tourism Council announced that by 2036, China’s travel and tourism sector is expected to nearly double in value to $3.5 trillion, generating one in every five new travel and tourism jobs worldwide. The country is on a roll as international arrivals rose 15.5% last year to more than 68 million with international visitor spending surpassing pre-pandemic levels at $135 billion. Theme parks are at the vanguard of this growth.

Recent data from Mordor Intelligence forecast that the Asia Pacific amusement park sector is set to grow by 29.6% to $99 billion by 2031 with the biggest single market being China as it accounted for 43.6% of the total last year. Looking specifically at the revenue generated by theme parks in China, Grand View Research predicted that it would nearly double to $23.5 billion between 2025 and 2033. If Disney does announce a second outpost in Shanghai then China might not just meet those targets, it could knock them out of the park.

Additional research by Chris Sylt