Saturday evening in Anaheim’s Honda Center, The Walt Disney Co. turned to Neil Patrick Harris to serve as a master of ceremonies for what is surely one of its most scrutinized events: The Disney Experiences showcase presentation at D23.
D23 of course is Disney’s in-house fan convention, and the showcase panels are used to reveal new projects and make news.
Disney turned to a late night theme for the event, with Harris hosting, joined by a live band, opening the event with a monologue full of Disney-related quips, like noting that the last host of the Experiences was Josh D’Amaro.
“Wait a minute. If my math is correct, I am 24 months away from being CEO, and 48 months away from owning the Lakers,” Harris quipped, before launching into an animatronic-themed, cameo-filled musical number.
Of course, it is D23, so it was the announcements that the fans wer eager to see.
Saturday’s showcase ended with a pair of showstoppers for Disney theme park fans, a refresh of Figment, one of Epcot’s original rides, including the return of the Dreamfinder character, and a revitalization of Disneyland‘s Tomorrowland, one of Walt Disney’s original visions. The concept: “New attractions, new open spaces, new places to dream about the future.”
“This particular Tomorrowland here at Disneyland was the one that was originally thought of and designed by Walt himself,” says Thomas Mazloum, the chairman of Disney Experiences, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “If you think about it, so much of that at the time was based on optimism: Optimism about the future, and this is going to be our North Star as we approach this particular work. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to change things. It just means we respect where we came from, but we use that optimism to carry us in the future, and in the case of this particular project, I think it proves we are listening carefully to what our guests are telling us while investing also in new generations.
“We’ve done a lot, as you know, on Disney California Adventure, and we’re going to continue to do more. But we also know we need to listen equally as carefully and harmonize what this icon, especially Disneyland, did to the world when it first opened,” Mazloum continued. “And so the way I approach this is really not to be beholden by the past, to respect it, but to take Walt’s original positiveness, this optimism, and use that as our inspiration for the creative that we’re going to introduce.”
Of course that wasn’t the only news Disney had to share. There were updates on new lands and projects announced two years ago like the Cars-themed area and Villains Land at Magic Kingdom, cruise ship updates, and plenty more. Mazloum spoke to THR ahead of the event to lay the groundwork for what the company is teeing up over the coming months and years, and his first few months leading the division succeeding D’Amaro, who is now Disney’s CEO.
“It’s been very simple and very smooth, Alex. Truth be told, even in my prior roles, I’ve reported to Josh D’Amaro, and in this role I continue to report to him. I’m very familiar with our businesses, and it was very exciting for me, frankly speaking, to travel,” Mazloum says, noting that he went to every Disney resort around the world, and many of its cruise ships, after taking the top job. “Recently, I shared a note with our team around the world, and I said to them in my final sentence, and I meant this: ‘This is the privilege of my lifetime.’
“The reason why I feel that way is traveling around the world made me once again realize we truly are having more projects currently happening than at any single point in our history, and it isn’t just the volume — and we’re going to share this obviously with our fans this week — it’s the creativity. And what I always think about is our founder Walt’s quote when he said, ‘Disneyland will never be completed if there is enough imagination left in the world,’ and imagine me traveling all around the world, looking at each side, seeing everything starting to come to life.”
While D23 in 2024 served as an unveiling for a barrage of projects that will bring new Disney IP to its theme parks and resorts around the world, this year’s event put more focus on the parks’ own IP. That includes Tomorrowland, of course, but also fan favorites like Figment, the dragon at who has become something of a mascot for Epcot in Orlando, and the yeti animatronic on the Expedition Everest ride at Animal Kingdom, which has been broken since shortly after the ride opened.
“What that really means to me is that we’re listening to all of our fans and our guests, and specifically that means harmonizing the various demands,” Mazloum says. “You might be familiar with what we do here at Disneyland, with Avengers Campus, Coco, the first-time attractions and IPs that not only satisfy our existing audience, but I believe will also appeal to new audiences, while harmonizing the need to pay attention also to what our existing fans that have been loyal for many years and often decades demand of us, and to do that is to make sure that we revitalize fan favorites and keep them nice and fresh and new, while also working on new lands, and it’s about really harmonizing these tools.
“What you will see is all the new lands and updates on everything that we have announced, and how we follow through, and how we put the creativity at work to create a world-class experience, but then you will also see as we talk about Figment, as we talk about Yeti, as we talk about Tomorrowland, you will see the focus on the existing guests that have been longing for this for a long time,” he added.
Things like the yeti animatronic might seem like small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but Mazloum frames them as a core piece of the Disney magic, getting families to return again and again, generation after generation.
“We are immensely focused on attention to details, and our guests, our fans, they genuinely care about our places, our parks, our cruise ships. They genuinely care about the stories,” he says. “They understand our commitment to tell our stories in an authentic way, the way only Disney can, and they hold us to a high standard. And our goal is to meet and exceed that standard.
“Whether it’s a nostalgic ride, whether it’s something like the Yeti, it may just be one small thing, but this is really something — a relationship between us and our fans that that we treasure and that is paying off,” he adds.
Disney’s Carousel of Progress at Disney World, for example, will be updated next year not only with new scenes, but also new voices, with Jamie Lee Curtis and Bryan Cranston set to voice characters on the attraction.
There will also be updates on the Disney Cruise Line, which has become a major source of investment for the company, with a flurry of new ships set to be delivered over the next half decade, including a new lightly smaller class of ships that Mazloum says will enable the company to add new locations in Alaska and Europe to its itineraries.
“It gives us a ton of flexibility, which we really want and need as we expand the cruise line both domestically and globally,” Mazloum says. “I always tell everyone it’s three vacations in one. You get the convenience of a cruise, especially for multi-generational travel, you get the Disney stories, and then you get your beach vacation or the beautiful destinations.
“So it’s a really incredible value proposition, and with our growing portfolio of parks around the globe — in future years, as you know, we also are working on another park in Abu Dhabi — but when you think about our global portfolio of parks right now, what the ships enable us is to a reach more people in the world that are Disney fans, and at the same time also connect them to our parks,” he adds. “Then you couple that with the fact that there’s still a sizable amount of the population that have never cruised, and on Disney Cruise Line in particular, we attract one of the highest amount of new to cruise guests in the industry.”
The next Wish-class ship, the Disney Believe, will include a statue of Moana in its atrium.
Ultimately Mazloum is betting that D23 will underscore how the company is leaning into what its theme park fans want, and can set the stage for his own tenure atop the most important experiential entertainment business in the world.
“What I’m really hoping that the fans will see, especially at this D23, is the creativity that we’re applying to all the new experiences we’ve announced, and how much we are listening to them, and how important their thoughts and their feelings are to us in in us reimagining some of their most favorite attractions, characters, or lands,” he says. “We’re gonna prove to the world and to our fans that we are following through on all the announcements we made two years ago. That we haven’t just announced it, we’re actually following through.”
