Walt Disney Company has announced it’s developing a theme park for the first time in 15 years in what will be its seventh resort worldwide. Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates has been chosen as the location
The Walt Disney Company has announced that it is developing a new theme park for the first time in 15 years.
The House of Mouse will build the new resort in Abu Dhabi, marking the company’s entry into the Middle East with what will be its seventh global destination.
Here is everything we know about the new park so far.
When will the park open?
Miral, an Abu Dhabi company, has been brought onboard to fully develop, build and operate the resort with Disney Imagineers leading creative design and operational oversight. Disney has said that the park will open in the early 2030s.
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What will be in the park?
Details so far are quite scant, however, the initial project plan includes one theme park and an unknown number of hotels.
The resort will be located on Yas Island, where Miral has developed other resorts, including SeaWorld YAS Island Abu Dhabi, Yas Waterworld, and Warner Bros. World. The Island is within a 20-minute drive of downtown Abu Dhabi and a 50-minute drive from Dubai.
Disney has said the park will be like a living “Tomorrowland” and its most technologically advanced park to date. That said, it will have a classic castle, as all Disney’s resorts do. Artistic renderings of the building suggest it will be made of a crystal-like structure.
CEO Bob Iger told ABC’s Good Morning America that it will be “the most technologically advanced theme park that we’ve ever built.”
The Abu Dhabi resort will be Disney’s first to sit directly on a waterfront in a way that will be accessible to guests. Advances in immersive gaming will also play a major part in the resort’s attractions.
“Every time we open a new experience or a theme park… it’s really important not just to take a theme park that might exist somewhere else and plop it into the ground in that new area that we would be going into,” Josh D’Amaro, the chairman of Disney Experiences, told CNN. “And so here in, in Abu Dhabi, we want the same thing.”
Why is Disney expanding its parks into the Middle East?
Theme parks are a growing part of Disney’s income. Despite being best known for its original output—films—Disney currently makes 59% of its operating income from parks.
In the US so far this year, attendance is up and revenue is growing as well. Things are a little trickier in Asia however, with attendance falling significantly in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the first quarter, perhaps as relationships with the US sour.
Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty caused in no small part by Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs, the cost of construction is likely to rocket in the US in accordance with the price of raw materials such as steel. Abu Dhabi may be less impacted by such price rises.
Disney hasn’t announced a new theme park since its 2010 Shanghai Disneyland news, with today’s announcement coming one month after Universal unveiled plans to build its seventh resort in Bedfordshire.
It’s clear why Disney has chosen Abu Dhabi as the location. Both the UAE’s capital and Dubai have large airports that connect to a third of the world’s population in four hours, including the 1.4 billion people living in India. D’Amaro said a potential 500 million people in the region have the means to visit a Disney theme park.
“There was no question that for our seventh resort, this is where it was going to be,” D’Amaro said.
The park will be more than 8,000 miles away from Anaheim, California – the site of the first Disneyland that opened 70 years ago.