Shanghai Disneyland will get a new expansion with a big Marvel Land! I'm not the one saying it, Bob Iger did. To be perfectly honest, although Bob Iger did not announced it
specifically during Disney’s quarterly earnings call but said this:
"Marvel has gotten extremely popular in China, and I think [Avengers: Endgame] has already done somewhere in the neighborhood of $600 million at the box office in China. So the idea of bringing the Marvel television shows to China as part of a direct-to-consumer platform ... is something that we're very, very interested in.
As it relates specifically to [our park in] Shanghai, we think we have a huge opportunity for Marvel there. That's a hint to our parks and resorts group." And Iger added that WDI imagineers "...should be hard at work already designing and developing some Marvel presence in Shanghaî”. Last but not least, as the conference call was ending he added: “…in China, we don’t have any restrictions. So I imagine we’re, at some point, going to get very ambitious about what we do with Marvel at Shanghai Disneyland.”
Couldn’t be more clear, right?
Building a Marvel land at SDL is almost a no-surprise as Marvel super heroes movies are very popular and make a lot of money in China, but even if a Marvel land won't open before years in Shanghaî, the first question to answer is: where in the park will they build it? A look at the land available thanks to Google Earth quickly reveal that there is not a lot of choice, specially if Disney wants to build a big Marvel land at Shanghaî Disneyland.
There is some land available near Adventure Isle but it was rumored that they keep it for a Pandora land, probably waiting to see if the new Avatar movies will be highly successful when they will be released in China. But that land is probably not big enough and anyway the transition from Adventure Isle to a Marvel land would not be the best.
The best place would be in front or near Tomorrowland but they won't build a Marvel land in the front or on the right because they don't have enough room and they won't build it right on the left either because they did the big mistake to build Toy Story Land there. I say "big mistake" because obviously the transition from a Tomorowland to a Marvel land would be more natural than a transition from Tomorrowland then to a Toy Story land then to a Marvel land. But nowthat a direct transition from Tomorowland to a Marvel land is not possible anymore we'll have to do with Toy Story land in between.
As you can see on the screen capture below ( click to enlarge the picture ) the best place, by far, to build a Marvel land at Shanghaî Disneyland is on the big land available in the back of the park, behind Toy Story land, Fantasyland and Treasure Cove.
A zoom in the image allows to see better the land available and the polygon i did using Google Earth tells us that this land is as big as 102.326 square meters! No need to say that they have more room than needed to build a Marvel land there, even the big one that Bob Iger seems to envision.
Yes, but, wait, wasn't it there that SDL Imagineers envisioned to build an Expedition Everest as some blueprints revealed?
That's righ,t but i was never convinced that Disney would build Expedition Everest at Shanghaî Disneyland. Why? because of sensitive political reasons. When you say "Everest" it also means "Tibet" ( Mount Everest has one side in Tibet ) and although the Chinese are saying that Tibet is a province of China since centuries the question is much more complicated than the official statement so building an Expedition Everest at SDL might be a bit risky. I know we're talking only about an attraction, but the question of symbolism in China is important, so...
Anyway, this Expedition Everest was supposed to be build behind Treasure Cove and if - and that's a big "IF" Disney decide to build it anyway, they might have enough room to build both a big Marvel land and Expedition Everest. Although i don't put my bets on Everest, i put them on a Marvel Land , specifically using the left part of the land as shown in the above polygon, and time will say if i was right or not!
Pictures: copyright Google, Disney
