After Cancelling A Fan-Favorite MCU Series, Disney+ Just Announced A TV Adaptation Of A Forgotten Park Ride
While Disney has made billions turning its movies into theme park attractions, the ride-to-screen pipeline has always been far less predictable. Pirates of the Caribbean became one of Hollywood’s biggest franchises, but Tomorrowland failed to launch. Haunted Mansion has struggled through multiple attempts, while The Country Bears and Jungle Cruise are probably best left in the Disney Vault. Despite this, one epic ride has always stood tall in the imaginations of park guests around the globe. Unlike most of the other rides tapped for adaptation, this one’s mythology wasn’t built around pirates, ghosts, or adventure, but instead it imagined humanity’s future, becoming one of the company’s most ambitious creations in Walt’s final years. Its popularity has never waned, though many guests jokingly wonder whether the ride itself or its lengthy air-conditioned respite from the Florida heat is the real attraction. Now, after years of sitting untouched while Disney mined other attractions in the parks for movies and tv, that long-overlooked favorite is finally getting a chance to shine on Disney+.
According to Variety, Disney+ has ordered a pilot for Spaceship Earth from It: Welcome to Derry co-showrunner Jason Fuchs. Lee Toland Krieger, who previously worked on You, Riverdale and Shadow & Bone, will direct the pilot. According to the report, the series will take the ride concept pretty literally and add some dynamic stakes, noting: “When a mission to avert an imminent global cataclysm goes awry, a small band of teenagers from Earth’s past and future must join forces to confront a threat as vast and mysterious as time itself.”
More Than Just a Theme Park Ride
Unlike attractions built around existing Disney properties, Spaceship Earth was built as part of Walt’s original vision for Epcot Center when the park expansion opened in 1982. Housed inside the park’s iconic sphere, the ride traces the evolution of human communication and history from prehistoric cave paintings to the digital age, celebrating the discoveries and achievements that have connected humanity across generations. Science fiction luminary Ray Bradbury even helped shape the attraction’s original story, hoping to reinforce Walt Disney’s belief that technology should bring people together rather than divide us.
Walt carried that philosophy through every aspect of the building of EPCOT, an acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. He didn’t want it to be another theme park, but a functioning city where tech could be demonstrated to improve daily life. Following Walt’s death, those plans eventually evolved into what we know as the modern EPCOT Center.
Modern sci-fi has already proven there is an audience for that kind of optimistic, human stories about space and exploration. Apple TV’s For All Mankind takes the history of the space program and asks what we could have accomplished had we kept moving forward, while Netflix’s Lost in Space reboot from director Neil Marshall turned a familiar space-family adventure into a series about people using science, ingenuity, and cooperation to survive overwhelming odds while traversing the galaxy. Those shows provide a great reason for Disney executives to look at what they can produce from their own untapped space station.
It is a shame the announcement has to come on the heels of the reveal that another show that also skipped past its sci-fi overtones to focus on humanity wasn’t receiving a second season. Wonder Man‘s cancellation seems to be a pain being felt across the creative minds at Marvel Studios, but that sting felt by fans will hopefully be soothed that the parent company is still trying to approve at least somewhat ambitious projects.
It Already Has One Unofficial Adaptation
Speaking of ambitious projects, this is not the first time the iconic Disney attraction has been featured in a film, at least not one the Disney company wants to acknowledge. Director Randy Moore created quite a stir when he released his cult indie horror title Escape from Tomorrow, a movie he secretly filmed inside Walt Disney World without the House of Mouse’s permission. The film’s bizarre climax takes place inside a surreal underground laboratory underneath the giant sphere, making it the closest the EPCOT icon has come to a film adaptation, albeit a wildly unofficial one.
This interpretation of Spaceship Earth may be just as dark and twisty if the logline and creative team are any indication. Fuchs and Krieger both have experience putting younger characters through increasingly dark and dangerous situations in their previous work. If Spaceship Earth really does follow teenagers working together across space and time, that combination with these producers could turn one of EPCOT’s most optimistic attractions into something far stranger than anyone is expecting from a theme park ride.
