The Disney Park That Hasn’t Built A New Ride In Decades But Is Increasing Its Ticket Prices

It is decades since Paris’s Disneyland park got a new ride to join the likes of Big Thunder Mountain,

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If Benjamin Franklin was alive today he would likely say that only three things are certain in life: death, taxes and Disney theme park ticket price rises. So it was no surprise when one of the Mouse’s resorts announced on Tuesday that the price of its annual passes is increasing with the most expensive one surging by $116 to $926. Staggeringly, this is despite the fact that one of the parks it grants access to hasn’t increased its tally of rides in the past 30 years.

Building new rides is at the heart of the business model for most major theme parks. The more rides they have, the more visitors they typically attract and the more they are prepared to pay. However, one Disney park has broken this rule for decades and, remarkably, it has had a magic touch on its fortunes.

Almost precisely 30 years ago guests started streaming through the turnstiles of the Space Mountain roller coaster at the Disneyland Park in Paris. Instead of being a carbon copy of its futuristic counterparts at Disney’s parks in Florida, California and Tokyo, the ride in Paris had a steampunk theme as it was based on Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon.

The book tells the story of a group of weapons enthusiasts in the late 1800s who attempt to build a giant cannon to shoot themselves into space. Reflecting this, at the start of the ride, the roller coaster car rockets up an incline through a giant replica of the cannon on the outside of the big top-shaped building, complete with a puff of smoke as it sets off. Unlike its namesakes around the world, the Space Mountain track in Paris features loops and corkscrews, all in the dark.

It has since been given a Star Wars theme but back when it opened 30 years ago, its French inspiration helped it to become a smash hit. It fueled a 21.6% rise in attendance at Disneyland Paris to 10.7 million people in 1995 whilst occupancy at the seven on site hotels surged by 8.5 percentage points to 68.5%. Crucially, Disneyland Paris made its first net profit since its debut in 1992.

The revenue of the resort’s parent company rose 9.5% to $950.1 million (FF4,667 million) leaving it with a $23.2 million (FF114 million) after-tax profit, up from a whopping $340 million (FF1,797 million) loss in 1994. The park’s then-chief executive Philippe Bourguignon rightly celebrated this achievement saying that “1995 was the year of Renaissance for Disneyland Paris. Space Mountain, our new attraction, was to be the symbol of this new momentum.” Little did he know that the park’s tally of rides would not increase for the next three decades.

It is the longest time any Disney theme park has ever gone without growing its roster of attractions and it wasn’t for want of trying. At the time there were plans for new rides in the park based on classic Disney cartoons including The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast as well as an Indiana Jones roving simulator which is currently being added to Disney’s Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

Even though Space Mountain was a runaway success, Disneyland Paris didn’t capitalize on this momentum by more rides to the park. Instead, Disneyland Paris used its new-found success as a springboard to develop the movie-themed Walt Disney Studios park next door. There was good reason for this.

Tearing Up The Script

Development of the Studios began long before the Disneyland Park’s ornate iron gates first swung open. Back then it was due to be called Disney-MGM Studios Europe as it was designed to be an almost-carbon copy of a similarly-named sprawling park at Disney World. Disney had high hopes for its Parisian counterpart and between 1990 and 1994 it spent a massive $213 million (€183 million) on the design and development of Disney-MGM Studios Europe. The park was originally due to open in 1995 but it was not to be.

A severe recession brought the curtain down on Disney-MGM Studios Europe and dark clouds gathered above the magic kingdom in Paris. As the resort was only part-owned by Disney, the media giant couldn’t pour money into it as it has done with its outposts in the United States. It led to Disneyland Paris becoming burdened with debt and the repayments brought it to the brink of collapse several times.

In May 1994, Saudi investor Prince Alwaleed brought some much-needed magic to Disneyland Paris by paying around $345 million for a 25% stake in the business. Just over a year later, the increase in the park’s popularity following the opening of Space Mountain provided the catalyst to convince Disney to put the Studios park back on the drawing board.

Wary of the already-uncertain economic climate, Disney tore up the original script for the Studios park and significantly scaled it back. As a result, the Walt Disney Studios cost just $538.1 million (€610 million) and opened in March 2002 with only nine attractions compared to around 40 in its fairytale-themed neighbor. Theming was thin on the ground as the Studios park was filled with beige hangar-like soundstages in order to look like an actual movie studio backlot. It arguably took its theme too seriously as critics nicknamed it ‘Warehouse World’ after its austere architecture.

Like a Hollywood disaster movie, lightning struck twice as it debuted to a severe recession brought on by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Staggeringly, in its first full year of operation, the combined attendance of both parks fell 5.3% to 12.4 million.

Ensuring that the Studios park could stand on its own two foot quickly became the priority for Disneyland Paris and it has taken the best part of 23 years to do it. Flush with funds from further financial maneuvers, major attractions were added to the park and over the 15 years to 2024 its attendance doubled to 5.6 million visitors according to the latest data from the Themed Entertainment Association.

The surge in the park’s popularity made the resort increasingly important to Disney and in 2012 this reporter’s colleague revealed in the Daily Telegraph that the media giant was planning to take full control of it. That is precisely what happened five years later and as I have since revealed in The Guardian and The Times, Disneyland Paris is now consistently profitable.

Five months after Disney got the keys to its Parisian outpost my colleague also broke the news in The Express that the Mouse was planning its biggest show of support yet by investing $2.1 billion in Disneyland Paris. This was officially announced in February 2018 by Disney’s chief executive Bob Iger and French president Emmanuel Macron.

The money was earmarked for three new lands in the Studios park with the first one – themed to Marvel superheroes – opening in 2022. On Monday, Disneyland Paris announced that on March 29, 2026 the Studios park will be renamed Disney Adventure World when it swings open the doors to its second land which will be based on the hit film franchise Frozen. The land is a scaled-down version of one which opened in Hong Kong in 2023 and has two rides rather than just a single log flume in Paris. It will however also be home to a show on a lake in the afternoons and evenings and Disney announced in a video that a free-roaming life-sized robotic version of Olaf the snowman from Frozen will appear there and in Hong Kong.

Ironically, perhaps the biggest news in the Disneyland Paris announcements about the Studios park came in a technical drawing of the lake show fountain structure which inadvertently indicated that a land themed to the hit Avatar movies might also be heading there. So far, Disneyland Paris has only officially announced the three lands with the remaining one featuring another log flume, this time themed to The Lion King.

No new rides were announced for the neighboring park and none are in the pipeline. This trend was first highlighted in a 2023 report by Robert Niles, the eminent editor of Theme Park Insider, who noted that “the last new construction addition to the park was Space Mountain: De la Terre a la Lune in 1995.”

True, some of the rides in the Disneyland Park have been upgraded with the Star Wars simulator getting scenes from the new movies while models of landscapes from Frozen have been added to the Storybook Land Canal Boats. New shows have also debuted in the park, with one of the latest being the Disney Tales of Magic fireworks display which began in January. However, the only new ride that has opened since Space Mountain is the Buzz Lightyear shooting simulator which debuted back in 2006 and replaced the Visionarium so it didn’t increase the tally in the park.

The lack of a new ride over the past two decades has led to the park having to promote more minor developments such as a new lighting package on Space Mountain. In turn, the park’s attendance has crashed by 4.7% over the 30 years to 2024 according to the latest data from the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) which Disneyland Paris declined to comment on. The drop may be unsurprising, given the dearth of new attractions in the park, but it is nonetheless shocking given the growth in global theme park tourism during that time. To put it in perspective, the combined attendance at the other Disney parks operating in 1995 has surged by 26.9% over the 30 years since then.

Disneyland Park is the only one of the world’s top 25 most-visited theme parks which hasn’t added a new attraction to its lineup for decades. Against the odds, this hasn’t stopped it from becoming Europe’s most-visited theme park with 10.2 million guests last year while the resort’s total revenue rose 7.4% to a record $3.5 billion (€3.1 billion). In turn, this enabled it to generate an impressive $156 million (€140 million) operating profit despite staff pay increasing by $119 million (€107 million) as this report revealed. The lack of new attractions in the Disneyland Park has stopped its running costs from surging and it had a trick up its sleeve to keep guests streaming through the turnstiles.

Disney’s Magic Formula

No expense was spared when Disneyland Paris was being developed as Michael Eisner, the visionary chief executive of Disney at the time, treated its theme parks as beacons of its brand so he ensured that they were of the highest quality. So despite employing armies of designers, Eisner engaged renowned architect Robert A. M. Stern to create several of the hotels in Paris. This wasn’t to make a splash but to ensure they stood the test of time. It paid off.

This ethos extended deep into the park where the attention to detail really is a whole new world. It is thanks to Disney’s designers who are known as Imagineers because of their imaginative use of engineering. Eisner picked the most talented of them to work on Disneyland Paris and the magic touch they gave it is instantly apparent on stepping onto Main Street U.S.A. at its entrance which has a turn-of-the-century theme.

The street is the handiwork of Eddie Sotto, a design legend who now runs his own acclaimed studio which has worked with clients including Ferrari, Porsche, Wynn Resorts and Virgin Galactic. To this day, Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland Paris is still seen as being one of the most immersive lands ever created, not in a kitsch kind of way but because it is packed with intricate and authentic details.

The street is lined with ornate iron lamps, has a bandstand at the bottom, a barbershop quartet sing in front of an actual barbershop and carriages pulled by horses trot up and down it. Looking closer reveals layer upon layer of details from carved cornices and stained glass domes inside the stores to curtains in the windows of the faux upper exterior floors of buildings. There are even tiled terraces with furniture on the upper floors which can only be seen from some of the buildings that have an actual second story.

No stone was left unturned inside either. In one of the stores, old-fashioned brass telephones hang on the wall and if you pick one up you can listen in on a conversation taking place as commonly happened in that era. Even the color of paint on Main Street was carefully chosen as Sotto explained in a social media post about its photography store which is packed with period props. “We deliberately went with sepia toned color scheme to immerse guests into a ‘Tintype’ photo. Amber tinted windows achieved the effect more fully,” he revealed. That’s just the start.

At the end of Main Street stands the centerpiece pink castle which is widely acknowledged to be the most eyecatching icon in any Disney park thanks to its abundance of spires and elaborate balustrades that twist around its spiral shape. It even has an eerily-lifelike full-size animatronic dragon in its basement. Indeed, it’s so popular that when ED92, the leading Disneyland Paris news site, asked its 70,000 followers to rate the castle it even attracted praise from Disney’s heartland of Orlando with one resident posting that it is “absolutely the most beautiful of all the Disney castles.”

It is the brainchild of Tom Morris, Imagineering’s former creative executive and an architect whose work is renowned around the world. “The number one thing that we needed to do was make this castle stand out from the other 40,000 castles that are in France,” he explained in 2022. “We did a lot of research and I went through a whole bunch of story books…and we put together kind of a collage board that said these are the DNA pieces, the feelings we want in the castle – softer, older, a little bit more medieval and not as much renaissance because a castle like the one in Walt Disney World is a classic gothic renaissance castle and those are what you find in the Loire valley.

“So we put together this board and we pitched it to Michael and he liked the idea…I think Mont St. Michel was the number one influence for the overall form and then for the individual details it was some of those story books. Then actually we did put a number of details from some of the best castles in France just to make sure that whatever we created had a French accent to it. So it is a classic story book castle with a French accent.”

It’s All In The Details

The four fantasy-themed lands behind the castle are also adapted to local tastes and the Vernian version of Space Mountain is testimony to this. It is unique to Disneyland Paris, as are other attractions which are aimed at different local audiences. The Alice in Wonderland hedge maze was designed with British visitors in mind while an alluring walkthrough attraction themed to Aladdin is particularly popular with travelers from the Middle East.

It was developed by Jim Shull, one of the most skilled artists ever to have worked at Imagineering. Highlighting the lengths Imagineering went to at Disneyland Paris, he gave an example on social media about its Big Thunder Mountain runaway mine train ride which is home to fields of fake cacti reflecting its origins in the Old West. The cacti don’t just look just like the real thing, they are even different sizes. “Given the size of the faux plant materials and the speed at which the guests race through the scene, some may argue this was an unneeded cost however I will disagree,” he said . “It adds to the texture.”

Shull added that “Imagineering spends many hours in research prior to picking up a pencil” and this has given Disneyland Paris versions of classic attractions which can’t be found elsewhere in the world.

One is the renowned Pirates of the Caribbean boat ride which sails past scenes of forts being ransacked. The California original begins with a big drop into caverns filled with skeletons indicating the perils to come. However, in Paris, the Imagineers couldn’t dig into the ground as they would hit the water table.

To surmount this, the boat is instead winched up an incline allowing the ride to begin with the scenes of plundering and end with a drop into the caverns of defeated pirates. In turn, this saved money as the Imagineers didn’t need to dig a hole for a basement. The saving was put to good use as it was invested in the development a pair of robotic sword-fighting pirates which are unique to the version in Paris and help to get guests to re-ride it.

In short, all these decades later, Disneyland Paris is still reaping the rewards from Eisner’s vision and the tireless quest for perfection from some of the Mouse’s most talented Imagineers. Remarkably, their hard work attracted criticism from some quarters of Disney at the time due to the spiralling cost of its project in Paris.

With hindsight, it was perhaps the best investment Disney has ever made as Disney pockets tens of millions of Dollars in profits from the park every year to this day and hasn’t even needed to foot the bill for increasing its roster of rides since 1995. No wonder Disney’s chief financial officer Hugh Johnston said in August that Disneyland Paris “is performing strongly” and he expects it “to do very well”. That was before Tuesday’s annual pass price hikes which came just one day after the announcements for the Studios park.

The lack of new rides in its neighbor was defended by Disneyland Paris’ president Natacha Rafalski in an interview with French newspaper Le Point in April “The experience in our parks doesn’t only come down to attractions,” she said. “I’m thinking of the new show Disney Tales of Magic, launched in January, or the renovation of our flagship attractions. For example, we’ve added new scenes to the Storybook Land Canal Boats attraction.” It didn’t go down well with fans.

“A show is not a new attraction. A renovation is not a new attraction (especially as half the park has been abandoned). Replacing scenes with others is not an addition. Not a single new attraction at Disneyland Paris since 1995,” pointed out Disneyland Paris expert TheMountainKing. Others concurred.

“If adding scenes to the Storybook Land Canal Boats is enough for her, well we’re not going to agree,” said Pedro. “Disney is a theme park. But being in denial to this extent is completely ridiculous. As if ‘Tales of Magic’ could compensate for the lack of ‘real new developments’. If we had truly significant new developments, it would be totally forgivable,” added Lucas.

Disneyland Paris declined to add anything to Rafalski’s interview though it may soon have to say more. In 2031 Disney’s arch-rival Universal Studios is due to open a park in the United Kingdom just a few hours by train from Paris. It is highly unlikely that a few new rides in Disney Adventure World will be enough to beat a brand new outpost from Universal so the Disneyland Park may at long last get a strong sprinkling of pixie dust. Time will tell whether that’s enough to give it a happy ending.

Additional Reporting by Chris Sylt