D23: Star Wars Land Announced For Disney Parks, But No Marvel

Attendees at the D23 Expo got to be front and center for one of the biggest announcements for Disney Parks in a while — and maybe ever. A big dose of a galaxy far, far away is coming to Disneyland and Disney’s Hollywood Studios, with Disney announcing that both parks will be getting 14-acre Star Wars Land expansions, the largest single-themed expansions ever planned by the company.

That’s awesome news for Star Wars fans, and plenty of us here at Bam Smack Pow fit that description. But after recent reports that Disneyland might get both Star Wars and Marvel lands, we couldn’t help but feel just a tiny bit left out.

So why Wookies and no web-slingers? Roth Cornet of HitFix may have hit it on the head with this tweet:

It’s long been known that Marvel sold the rights to its characters (a bunch of them, anyway) to Universal Studios for exclusive use in Florida theme parks. That happened well before Marvel was acquired by Disney, and much as it must rankle the House of Mouse to see its chief Orlando theme park competitor make money off of characters that now belong to Disney, there’s not a whole lot that can be done about that.

The assumption has always been that whatever deal was signed didn’t apply to Disneyland, but the truth is that except for the executives and lawyers who were in on the deal, no one knows the exact language. Thus, we’ve seen Disney use Marvel movie characters in exhibits and the like but nothing like a full-fledged attraction, let alone an entire themed land.

It stands to reason that if Disney had the unfettered right to do as it pleased with Marvel super heroes in California, it would have moved ahead with plans based on them a while ago; before Star Wars, actually, as Disney only bought that property three years after it had purchased Marvel.

There’s nothing we can do but wait and hope that situation gets sorted out. I’ll say this, though: if there are Star Wars and Marvel lands in Disneyland 5-6 years from now, you’re going to have a hard time dragging me out of that place, middle-aged adult or not.

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