Disney Is Making a Movie About the Creation of Disneyland
It’s already “The Happiest Place on Earth,” but at this point we might want to add a second nickname: “The Most Mythologized Theme Park Ever.”
Disney+ already has a variety of programs about the creation of Disneyland and various other Disney parks available to stream, like Behind the Attraction and The Imagineering Story. They also have several of the vintage Disneyland television show episodes from the 1950s about the park’s development. Clearly, it’s something their audience has an appetite for. And now the streaming service is making a historical fiction film about “Walt Disney’s journey to building Disneyland.”
Per Deadline, the film will be directed by David Gordon Green of Pineapple Express and the recent Halloween franchise, and written by Evan Spiliotopoulos, the writer of The Jungle Book 2, Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, and the live-action Beauty and the Beast.
Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955 and quickly revolutionized the theme park business. It cost the equivalent of about $130 million in today’s dollars to build, money he raised in part by creating the television show Disneyland for ABC. The show eventually became the long-running The Wonderful World of Disney — and ABC eventually became a property of the Walt Disney Company.
Green’s film won’t be the first time Disney has made a fictional biography about Walt Disney. In 2013, they released Saving Mr. Banks about the creation of the Mary Poppins movie, starring Tom Hanks as Disney. Around that same time, they also announced a fictional movie based on the Magic Kingdom that would have been directed by Jon Favreau. That movie never came together and eventually Favreau moved on, first to The Jungle Book and The Lion King and then to Star Wars and The Mandalorian. In a way, this idea sort of fills the void left by that unmade project.
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