Disneyland Abu Dhabi Will Be Indoors Says Theme Park Operator

Last week Disney announced that its first theme park in the Middle East is coming to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Since then, fans haven’t just been guessing about the rides which will be in the new park but also how it will handle the heat in the region. That question has now been answered.

Disney’s announcement confirmed the news that this author broke the previous week following a tip off from outside the UAE. As my report forecast, the Abu Dhabi venture will not follow Disney’s usual model of owning and operating its theme parks. Instead, Disney has entered into an agreement with Miral, which operates the most-visited theme parks in the Middle East.

Miral will fund, develop and build the new park which will use Disney’s characters and Intellectual Property under a license. In return, Disney is expected to receive royalties based on a percentage of the tickets and merchandise sales. Disney will also provide operational oversight though the new park will be operated by Miral which is contracting Disney’s Imagineers – architects named after their imaginative use of engineering – to design it.

The model is a win-win as Disney doesn’t have to invest any capital in the development or construction of the new park and it also benefits from Miral’s operational expertise in the Middle East. In just the past 15 years Miral has built up a world-class collection of three theme parks and one water park on Abu Dhabi’s man-made Yas Island.

The site is the spiritual successor to a plan put in motion almost precisely 60 years ago by Walt Disney. Called the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, Disney developed plans for a community sitting on a swathe of undeveloped land near Orlando, Florida. At the heart of the complex was a Disney theme park surrounded by hotels, convention facilities, a residential district, golf course and an industrial park.

The plan was announced in October 1966 in a video presentation by Walt himself, a famed futurist who believed that many of the problems in cities could be solved with technology and planning. Sadly the plan never came to fruition as Walt passed away just two months after the video was filmed. Instead of developing the residential district, his eponymous company built the Walt Disney World resort near Orlando which includes a park themed to science, innovation and cultural exploration. To this day the park is still known as Epcot in a nod to the acronym of the original plans.

Although Disney’s plan died along with Walt himself, Yas Island proves that a beautifully-landscaped planned community with theme parks at its heart casts a powerful spell.

Yas is comfortably the world’s most well-connected major resort as it is home to upscale residential communities, schools, a business district, deluxe hotels, a marina, a mega mall with 370 shops, an arena, a beach, an F1 racing circuit and a golf course which holds a round of the PGA European Tour, all within walking distance of multiple major theme parks. They are based on some of the most well-known brands in entertainment including SeaWorld, Ferrari and Warner Bros.

As this report explained, each park broke new ground and exceeded the expectations set by its predecessors. Giving further insight into this, Miral’s talented chief executive Mohamed Al Zaabi recently told this author he insists that the “next experience will be better than the previous one. That’s what we do always at Miral. We keep pushing the bar.”

Two years ago this led to the opening of SeaWorld Abu Dhabi which debuted the world’s most innovative theme park ride. Miral’s parks aren’t just the leaders in the Middle East, they are amongst the most innovative and immersive anywhere in the world. It has earned them a string of industry awards and in turn this had a magic touch on their attendance.

As this author revealed in local newspaper, The Khaleej Times, Warner Bros. World in Abu Dhabi is the first theme park in the Middle East to appear on the Themed Entertainment Association’s Global Attractions Attendance Report. Its latest data shows that 1.8 million people streamed through the turnstiles of Warner Bros. World in 2023 with a further 1.4 million visiting SeaWorld Abu Dhabi in its first 12 months. It contributed to Yas Island recording 34 million visits in 2023 and it hasn’t slowed down since then as attendance increased by 10% last year.

There is a magic formula to Miral’s success and the format of the parks is at the heart of it. Aside from the water park, all of the parks on Yas Island are indoors and there is good reason for this.

Saying that Abu Dhabi has a hot climate is somewhat of an understatement. Often the heat billows from all angles like it is coming from a huge hairdryer and the sidewalk can get so hot that it melts the soles of shoes. It’s so hot that often you can’t even cool down with fans which spray mist as the water warms up the moment it hits the air.

In winter, it can hit 90 degrees and in summer the mercury soars above 110 giving it a ‘feels like’ temperature of up to 130. To put that into context, in Orlando the National Weather Service issues “excessive heat warnings” if the ‘feels like’ temperature passes 113 degrees.

Being indoors enables the Abu Dhabi parks to shield guests from the searing heat and also allows them to be decorated with intricately-detailed scenery as it isn’t open to the elements. As a result of this, even the exteriors of the attractions in the parks have a similar standard of theming to that which you usually find on the interior of a Disney or Universal ride. That’s just the start.

Building the parks indoors enables the ride buildings to be hidden behind internal walls which immerses guests in a fantasy world in a way outdoor parks cannot match. You usually know what you’re in for when you head towards a theme park ride as a hulking building looms beyond the entrance. It breaks the fantasy and spoils the surprise. In contrast, at Miral’s parks, the elaborate entrances to many of the rides are set into the internal walls which has an enchanting effect as it makes the doorways seem like portals to different worlds.

This is used to great effect in the Cartoon Junction land at Warner Bros. World, where Hanna-Barbera stars like Scooby-Doo are said to live next to Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny from Looney Tunes. The entrances to their rides are actually the front doors of a row of cartoony brightly-colored town houses. Some only have small signs hanging in front so it can be hard to tell the rides from the shops which are also set in wonky-walled buildings.

The queue for one roller coaster winds through a house which looks like it has been trashed by Tom and Jerry. As you get deeper inside it looks like you are going under the floorboards before you pass the mouse’s bed which is set inside a oversized sardine can. Even the queue railings look like Jerry has made them from ear buds and bits of rope.

As guests wind through the dimly-lit queue corridors they still don’t know what’s coming. This adds to the element of surprise when they end up in a cavernous room where they board the roller coaster underneath a huge bluprint on the wall which appears to have been scrawled by the mouse. Giving a hint of things to come, it shows an elaborate contraption for stealing cheese and transporting it back to his den. Continuing this theme, the ride cars are shaped like slabs of cheese and spin as they zip down the track in pitch darkness with giant statues of Tom and Jerry lighting up as they pass them.

This astounding attention to detail sets a high bar for Disney’s outpost which will also be located on Yas Island and is billed by the studio’s chief executive Bob Iger as being its “most technologically advanced theme park”. Given the creative benefits and protection from the scorching heat, it was inevitable that the park would be built indoors.

Reflecting this, Al Zaabi recently told the DubaiEye radio station that his “priority is to create convenient and unique customer experiences for our guests. We really want them to enjoy their time and have the best experience here in Abu Dhabi. And it has to be as convenient as we can. As you know, we have done all our theme parks indoor. So Disney will be an indoor theme park. We will make it easy for them to arrive, convenient experience on arrival, getting in and enjoying as many rides as possible.”

This will make it Disney’s first indoor theme park though that’s not the end of the story. The outdoor roller coasters at Ferrari World Abu Dhabi cover a footprint which is almost as large as the park itself. So just because Disneyland Abu Dhabi will be indoors, like Miral’s other parks, that doesn’t mean it has to be entirely indoors.

Testimony to this, Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney’s Experiences theme park division, recently told CNBC that in Abu Dhabi “we’re being incredibly ambitious in terms of the architecture, use of indoor and outdoor space.” He added that “one of the great things about the piece of land that we’ll be building on is it’s right up against the water and so we’ll be pulling water into this resort.”

When Disney announced that it is partnering with Miral some fans were sceptical of whether its indoor parks model would suit Disney. One wrote that Disney’s parks “have always been about the spectacle. Can Imagineers deliver a castle that has that ‘wow’ factor without making it feel separated from the guest but also not looking like it’s under a dome? I don’t think Disney would allow Miral to build a park that simply places Disney attractions and concepts under a roof like has been done with Ferrari World, WB Movie World, and Sea World.”

Another question is how Disney’s iconic nightly fireworks shows could be held if the park was indoors. Warner Bros. World incorporates an innovative solution in its central plaza which looks like a square from Hollywood’s golden age and is lined with art deco architecture. It hosts Warner’s equivalent of a fireworks show where scenes of classic movies from Superman to the Lord of the Rings are beamed onto billboards above the buildings and even the arched ceiling itself.

During the Harry Potter segment, projections magically turn the ceiling into a night sky before the villainous Dementors fly past the moon and onto the surrounding buildings. The projection-mapped images transform them into the walls of the Great Hall at Hogwarts complete with detailed brickwork and stained glass windows. Impressive as it is, it isn’t the same visceral experience as a fireworks show.

The wizard with the task of pulling this off indoors is Al Zaabi. A supremely-talented manager who began his 25-year career in business working for the UAE government, he eventually switched to ALDAR Properties, Abu Dhabi’s biggest listed property developer where he rose to the role of director of strategic investment. This gave him high-level experience of the role real estate plays at the heart of the UAE’s economy and he put it to use when he moved to Miral in 2015.

Al Zaabi had a vision of making Yas Island a hub for the world’s leading theme parks and it took more than the wave of a magic wand to pull it off.

His first step was to put together a team of the theme park industry’s top talent with many of them coming from the biggest operators, including Disney. Crucially, Al Zaabi is supported by HE Mohamed Al Mubarak, the chairman of Miral and Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT). A graduate of Northeastern University in Boston, Al Mubarak is one of Abu Dhabi’s most prominent business figures having been chief executive of ALDAR before becoming chairman of the DCT where he has turned the city into a global cultural powerhouse. His visionary approach brought the Louvre to Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island cultural district with a Guggenheim, a Natural History Museum and a National Museum also under construction.

Contrary to what some observers have suggested, Yas Island hasn’t become a powerhouse of the theme park industry by simply spending vast sums of money. It is thanks to tireless multi-tasking and networking from Al Zaabi and Al Mubarak as well as their encyclopedic knowledge of the theme park industry.

Instead of taking whatever entertainment brands became available, as some other nations have done, they selected the renowned ones and, crucially, ensured that the outposts in Abu Dhabi became worldwide flagships. This approach encouraged Ferrari, Warner Bros. and SeaWorld to plant their flags on Yas Island. In turn, the high caliber of these attractions convinced Warner Bros. to make Yas Island the location of the first Harry Potter theme park rides outside Universal Studios.

This consistent curation and care of Intellectual Property eventually tempted Disney to Abu Dhabi and when its park opens, Yas Island will be the world’s only theme park resort featuring Disney, Harry Potter, SeaWorld and Warner Bros. That alone makes Al Zaabi and Al Mubarak the theme park industry’s leading dealmakers.

This spellbinding strategy isn’t just thanks to expertise and a supremely skilled team but also control over the standard of the end product as Miral funds, owns and operates all of its parks. Miral knows the theme park industry in the region better than any other company and is putting its own money on the line so it makes perfect sense for it to decide whether Disney’s park is indoors or outdoors.

Anyone who has visited the parks on Yas Island knows that being indoors is crucial to their success. One such person is this author’s friend Robert Niles, the editor of Theme Park Insider. In a prescient post, he wrote in June last year that “if Disney ever builds a fifth theme park in Florida, it needs to be all-indoors…An indoor theme park would allow Disney’s guests to enjoy their day in comfort, while providing Disney’s Imagineers an opportunity to create the most immersive lands and attractions imaginable.

“Start by sending a team of Imagineers and Disney executives on a benchmarking trip to Yas Island in Abu Dhabi. Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi remains the creative model for what an indoor theme park can be, with the skyscape and lighting in each land perfectly designed for its theme. It’s an inspiration for what is possible in immersive themed entertainment design.”

Some might say that the phenomenal popularity of the outdoor Expo 2020 in nearby Dubai suggests otherwise as it attracted a staggering 24 million visitors in just six months. Although the temperature peaked at 104 degrees, it only only hit levels like this a few times. That’s because the Expo was held during the cooler months of October to March whereas Disneyland Abu Dhabi will be open year-round.

Nearby Qatar has developed futuristic outdoor air-conditioned corridors which look like they have come straight out of Epcot as highlighted in the photo below. However, the way that Miral actually plans to keep guests cool may be much simpler than that and could be hiding in plain sight.

Just because Disneyland Abu Dhabi is indoors doesn’t mean it will be box-shaped. For example, Ferrari World Abu Dhabi looks more like a three-pointed star and is adorned with the luxury automaker’s iconic shield. Bearing this in mind, it is perhaps worth noting that Disney distributed two pieces of concept art at its announcement last week. One showed an overhead view of the park whilst the other was of the crystal-like centerpiece castle underneath what appears to be a shooting star. But is it?

Disney’s movies are famous for starting with an animation of a shooting star or Tinker Bell’s pixie dust trail in an arc above Cinderella’s castle but close inspection of the Abu Dhabi artwork reveals key differences to this. Firstly, as shown by the photo at the start of this article, the spire of the castle in Abu Dhabi is well underneath the arc whereas it usually cuts behind it in the animation as can be seen here. The Abu Dhabi arc is much taller and also touches the ground making it look more like a dome.

Of course, this is far from conclusive evidence that parts of the Abu Dhabi park will be under a dome but details matter to Disney and it seems unlikely that it would have chosen a different trajectory for the shooting star by accident. Moreover, Disney is known to have planned a park which featured several soaring transparent spheres.

Called Port Disney, the park was planned for Long Beach, California and was announced in 1990. The spheres were due to house marine-themed attractions whilst the park was also expected to have a land based on Jules Verne’s book Mysterious Island. Port Disney was reportedly cancelled due to the losses incurred by Disneyland Paris, which opened in 1992, so the Mysterious Island land instead debuted at Tokyo DisneySea nine years later.

DisneySea is widely considered to be the most immersive Disney park worldwide making it the standard for Abu Dhabi to beat to maintain its record of collecting flagships for each brand. In February last year Al Zaabi visited DisneySea so he has first-hand knowledge of what that will take.

The overview of the Abu Dhabi park in the concept art doesn’t show a dome though, potentially, that could be because the entire area is covered by one. It does however show wavy lines leading up to the castle which look suspiciously like the wavy walkways which were due to lead up to the domes in Port Disney. Whilst this is speculative, it is worth noting that if Disneyland Abu Dhabi was formed from multiple domes it would enable visitors to see the nightly fireworks display through them. It would also, without a doubt, fit the bill of the being Disney’s most technologically advanced theme park. That’s not all.

Comparing the artwork with Disney’s previous plans requires deep industry knowledge which my colleague and I have built up over the past 25 years of reporting. We are the only journalists worldwide who specialize in writing about the theme park industry for national media and as this archive shows, we have covered it for more than 30 leading outlets around the world including the BBC, The Times of London, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Independent, and the London Evening Standard.

In addition to this work, we also report on the movie industry and have been covering it for the same outlets for almost as long. Through this work we have got to know Hollywood A Lister Kurt Russell, one of the few actors still active today who has worked for Iger, his predecessor Michael Eisner and even for Walt Disney himself.

In 2017 we spent a weekend with Russell and his family at Disney World where he told us about an encounter he had at Disney’s studio in Burbank with Walt when he was planning his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

“I distinctly remember coming to work early one day and there was a kiosk on Dopey Drive which always showed the news of the week. It was early in the morning and I was walking past the animation building, past the theater and I was nearly at the commissary where the kiosk was. Right next to that was where I would sometimes play ping pong with Mr Disney at lunch. Sometimes he would call me in and I would sit down and have lunch with him.

“This time I was looking at this kiosk and it showed a picture of this cool domed thing called Epcot. Suddenly I heard ‘what do you think of that?’ I turned around and it was Mr Disney and I said ‘Hey good morning. That looks cool. What is that?’ And he said it’s an enclosed environment. He took me somewhere else and he had a model of it and a bunch of drawings which looked like a town and part of it was under a dome. He was talking about it being a controlled environment and making it rain if you wanted to.

“It was amazing but he wasn’t showing it to boast about what he was working on, he was interested in what people thought. I would always feel the moment. Even at 14 it was fun to feel somebody have so much pleasure with something that they hadn’t unveiled yet. He said ‘this is coming. We are going to do this’ and, as luck would have it, I came to the opening of Disney World in 1971.”

The plans for the dome even made it into the 1966 New York Times which reported that “Walt Disney Productions today announced it would build the world’s first glass-domed city amid Disneyworld, a $100 million entertainment center.” The Chicago Tribune added that “plans for the world’s first glass domed city, a Disney World, five times bigger than the Disneyland in California, were unveiled here yesterday.” More than 60 years later it may finally see the light of day.