The Marvel Experience

Out-questing DisneyQuest. Image © Disney.

Location: touring across North America
Opening date: summer 2014

The most exciting Marvel announcement yet actually has nothing (directly) to do with either Disney or theme parks.

The Marvel Experience is a highly experimental undertaking produced by Hero Ventures that looks to out-DisneyQuest Walt Disney World’s DisneyQuest (which was originally an attempt to take the Disney parks out on the road and place them in people’s backyards across the US).

A series of domes, the largest being six stories tall, will house several different types of attractions, ranging from character interactions to holographic projections to 4D first-person films shot from the perspective of various superheroes, such as Spider-Man.

The nearly two-acre footprint that the Marvel Experience will occupy will also contain the usual amenities – such as counter-service eateries, comic book convention-esque vendors, and, of course, restrooms – as well as some unusual offerings, including games and an overarching narrative that everything will be connected to.

It’s this last bit that stands out the most clearly. Thanks to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando, every last element of the theme park experience, from gift shops to cafeterias to bathrooms, is now just as thematically crucial to the overall level of immersion as are the attractions; if Hero Ventures truly can weave its guests through all the various steps of all its various domes, with each stop adding to the one before it, the sky is truly the limit for what will be possible with themed entertainment, whether that be at a traditional park, at a restaurant, or at these new types of touring events.

The pitfalls, however, are numerous – and steep.

In addition to the intrinsic difficulties of being a brand-new venture, the Marvel Experience is looking at only a budget of $30 million – great for keeping ticket prices low (the $30 range is what has been floated thus far), but extremely lacking when compared to the $400 million budget for Diagon Alley or the $600 million reportedly being spent on Pandora - The World of Avatar at Animal Kingdom. And although promising to stop at several locations all throughout North America, the sheer size required precludes a number of destinations, making the operation a lot less flexible than perhaps initially thought.

 
Any attraction that can tap into this full roster will instantly be epic. Image © Disney.

Beyond the possibility of being branded as a “carnie” attraction, there’s one final difficulty in what is obviously such a risky venture: the competition that will be foisted upon Disney’s traditional theme parks (one of the reasons that DisneyQuest never ultimately got off the ground [no pun intended]). Not only are more “vacation destinations” being planted to divert potential guests, there’s the inexorable comparisons between a tiny upstart company’s efforts at thematically deploying Marvel’s characters and Disney’s own hitherto barebones initiatives.

On the one hand, the more that the Marvel Experience succeeds, creatively as well as commercially, the more that the Disney brand looks comparatively weak; on the other hand, should the Experience prove to be a dud, it may scare the Mouse off from any future large-investment undertakings.

Then again, competition is the name of the game, and the only outcome that fans of immersiveness should actively hope for is an ever-faster hurtling to theming nirvana.