Disney Reveals How It Plans To Put A New Spin On Its Spider-Man Ride

Disney has revealed that it plans to give more muscle to its Spider-Man theme park attraction by developing new interactive merchandise based on future films featuring the web slinger as well as possibly inserting new scenes to keep the ride current.

The Spider-Man ride is the star attraction of the Avengers Campus lands at Disneyland Paris and the Disneyland Resort in California. It gives guests the impression they are in Spidey’s shoes as they sit in ride vehicles and appear to shoot webs at 3D screens in front of them by flicking their wrists. It is thanks to some technical wizardry including four infra-red cameras which are hidden in the ceiling of the ride car and track the position of the guests’ eyes, shoulders, elbows and wrists 60 times per second.

Hand tracking hardware isn’t the ride’s only super power. It is also combined with an artificial intelligence system which forecasts where the webs would land if they were fired in real life. The trajectory is based on the positions of the riders’ shoulders, wrists and elbows when their arms stop moving forward and the system then renders a 3D web which corresponds to the eye positions. Cleverly, this AI system is combined with machine learning processes which enable it to adjust the experience depending on the skill of the players.

Web Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure became an overnight success when it opened in California in 2021 and in Paris the following year due to its high level of interactivity and competition between riders. Guests get the first taste of this at the end of the queue which winds through sleek and futuristic corridors. They are meant to be set inside a laboratory and culminate in a briefing from Spider-Man, played by his real-life alter-ego Tom Holland. An ultra-HD projection of him is beamed onto an almost-invisible screen so he seems to be standing in the middle of the lab.

In an all-new story written specifically for the ride, the web-head unveils an army of tiny Spider-Bots which go rogue so the guests have to round them up. They then don a pair of 3D glasses and step into the ride cars which each seat four people. The slow-moving vehicles stop in front of a series of 3D screens which are so high resolution they are indistinguishable from the walls they are set into.

The screens show scenes of the Spider-Bots wreaking havoc in locations based on the Marvel Studios super hero movies. If you aim well enough, the webs which appear to shoot from your wrist will snag the robots which explode in time with a blast of air fired at the riders from a hidden vent.

The webs can be used to snag on-screen scenery like boxes and levers which alter the futuristic landscapes filled with the rogue robots. In one scene they are packed behind glass panels which shatter when the webs hit them sending the cute critters pouring in.

Another scene sees furniture strewn around the landscape which can be dragged with the webs. Pulling a table reveals a button which can be hit with another web to open a door so that yet more of the Spider-Bots stream in. The effects are all generated in real time so no two rides are the same, especially as different riders have different strategies for snagging the Spider-Bots.

They have different colours and riders get different points depending on which ones they hit. The riders’ results are shown on a screen at the end of the attraction which gets their competitive juices flowing.

The randomness of the ride combined with the desire to get the highest score encourages guests to go on it again which, of course, means passing through the gift shop at the exit one more time. Back in 2019 we revealed that Disney’s Imagineers, the wizards who design its theme parks, were developing the ‘hero-product’ for Avengers Campus – the must-have merchandise which would be sold in it.

“A hero-product is the one that is going to be iconic,” said Helene Chaupin, senior manager of product development for Disneyland Paris. Ingenious merchandise doesn’t just promote the land, it drives guests back to it too. As the items are largely unique to the park, they bring back memories of being there. “They are souvenirs which bring back the emotion you had in the park,” said Chaupin. “They are unique products which you won’t find elsewhere.” It is no exaggeration.

One of the merchandise lines accompanying the Spider-Man attraction isn’t just themed to the ride, it interacts with it. Inspired by Marvel’s armoured avenger, Iron Man, the products are Bluetooth-enabled gauntlets which upgrade the virtual web shooters on the ride so guests can get heroic scores. The gauntlets transform the virtual webs into projectiles which are usually fired by Spidey’s sidekicks such as the repulsor beams generated by Iron Man’s armour.

Cunningly, the gauntlets can also be used as toys so kids can play with them at home which reminds them to nag their parents to book another trip to the parks. A mini air blower is hidden in the palm of one of the gauntlets so that it looks like the wearer can levitate light objects. Another fires strands of string so little ‘uns can pretend to be the web-head himself.

The gauntlets drive revenue for Disney and fuel further visits as Scot Drake, portfolio creative executive at Walt DisneyDIS
Imagineering, explained to us in July last year.

“Going through the attraction with repulsors is a very different experience than with webs. The attraction senses right at the beginning who is wearing the gauntlets and it is only because of the technology we are using that we can have add-ons like this. We are going to continue to release new web tech based on upcoming characters and upcoming films. There are going to be more of these add-ons.” That could just be the start.

Drake added that “we can 100% swap out the scenes in future. This is such a dynamic story universe that nothing gets set in stone. Everything we have done has flexibility, repeatability and dynamic story-telling at its heart.”

The latest instalment in the Spider-Man saga, Spider-Man: No Way Home, was released in 2021 and grossed $1.9 billion according to industry analyst Box Office Mojo. A sequel was inevitable in light of that blockbuster performance and Marvel Studios’ president Kevin Feige finally confirmed it last week. “All I will say is that we have the story. We have big ideas for that and our writers are putting pen to paper now,” he said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

Theming the ride to the next Spider-Man movie would give it a new lease of life and there is a proven track record for this. Disney even has a term for it. Known as ‘plusing’, it essentially means updating older attractions and has seen characters from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies inserted into the classic ride whilst scenes from the latest Star Wars movies were added to the Star Tours simulator which debuted in 1987. We revealed in 2014 that the update to Star Tours was coming to Disneyland Paris and it cost a cool $69.4 million (€65 million) according to one of the Imagineers who was involved with the project

Plusing the Spider-Man ride by tying it more closely to the movies would address one of the few complaints about it. Disney’s Marvel rides don’t tend to feature the villains that the movies are famous for. Although the theme park rides are meant to be set in a different universe to the movies it could be confusing if they featured enemies who have already been beaten on the silver screen so Disney as largely steered away from this so far.

However, the latest plot line in the Marvel movies involves alternate universes colliding and this opened the door to developing a theme park attraction featuring their most well-known bad guy, Thanos. The purple-skinned tyrant was the antagonist of Avengers: Endgame, the second-highest grossing film in history, and although he was turned into dust in the finale of the movie, a version of the character which won the battle in an alternate universe will be back in a future Avengers theme park ride.

With total takings of $28.3 billion, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the most successful franchise in film history so strengthening the ties between the movies and the theme park attractions could prove to be a dream ticket.