5. NBA Experience

DisneyQuest's 100,000 square foot facility was demolished in fall 2017. In its place rose the NBA Experience – a two-floor, 44,000 square foot facility (about the size of an ESPN Zone, ironically) custom-built to cater to an emerging relationship between Disney and the National Basketball Association.

The NBA described the endeavor as a "one-of-a-kind" attraction developed by Walt Disney Imagineering that would "immerse" visitors in the "heart-pounding action and excitement" of the NBA, creating a "destination for basketball fans from all over the world." Despite the bluster, few Disney fans weren't sold on the attraction's early promise of featuring trivia games, replay videos, and photo opportunities as its major offerings... Turned out, they were right to be worried.

The NBA Experience opened in August 2019, and the early word from Cast Members, reviewers, and the usually-glowing press was... well... mixed. It turned out that the NBA Experience – Disney's hugely-marketed new attraction that replaced the nostalgically-beloved, cult-classic DisneyQuest – was the dud fans expected.

Inside, guests could practice dribbling basketballs by mirroring footage on video monitors, watch replays of famous NBA moments, tour a locker room museum to take selfies with trophies, use slingshots to launch dodgeballs into basketball hoops, and play NBA2K19 on a bank of XBOX 360s. Probably the coolest experience was the chance to "shoot hoops" while a projected audience cheered... and guests queueing behind you watched impatiently. 

Maybe if the NBA Experience had been marketed as an NBA-themed "pop-up selfie museum" with a handful of interactive experiences for kids, fans would've at least had the right expectations going in. It probably also would've been better if the NBA Experience was marketed as an "NBA Visitors Center" open to the public... for free. 

But after handing over $34 per person? $136 plus tax for a family of four?! With negative reviews spreading and Disney fans' schadenfreude growing, the NBA Experience went into triage mode pretty quickly.

WHAT HAPPENED: By late August 2019, NBA Experience Cast Members were dispatched into Disney Springs to dribble with families and drum up interest in the attraction – a very bad thing to need weeks after opening. Though perhaps unfair, fans seemed to relish in the obvious underperformance of the NBA Experience – a flop that everyone except Disney saw coming a mile away.

In September (just a month after its debut), the NBA Experience started offering free admission to Disney Cast Members. In November, admission was dropped to $19 for Annual Passholders. In February 2020, the Park Hopper Plus ticket add-on gained a new perk: free admission to the NBA Experience. That might've been enough to get people in the door. We don't know, because in March 2020, Walt Disney World shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Disney Springs reopened in May 2020... but the NBA Experience didn't.

In fact, it wasn't until August 2021 – a year and a half after its pandemic closure – that Disney quietly confirmed that the NBA Experience would never reopen. With just a six month lifespan, it's one of the shortest-lived "permanent" experiences at Walt Disney World... and certainly among the most costly flops the resort has ever seen.

6. Club Disney

Another doomed outing from Disney Regional Entertainment, "Club Disney" was a short-lived foray into the "family entertainment center" business dominated by another rodent: Chuck E. Cheese.

The first Club Disney opened in February 1997 in Thousand Oaks, California. A pay-one-price entry fee permitted a family into a playground of experiences like play-places, Disney karaoke, animation classes, a computer lab called ‘The Mousepad,’ the Applaudeville Theater, arcade games, dance stages, and more.

Subsequent installations (in West Covina, California; Chandler, Arizona; Lone Tree, Colorado; and finally Glendale, Arizona) would feature uniquely-themed play structures and one-off attractions like a Tarzan-themed zipline and “Herc’s Gym” themed to Hercules. Families could also purchase Annual Passes to the "Club," signing up for family fitness classes, computer classes, and other unique offerings. 

WHAT HAPPENED: Unlike his much more esteemed competitor (whose roots in the business trace back to the '70s), Mickey's attempt to enter the market came a little too late, as evidenced in the definitive telling of the story by our longtime friends at Defunctland. All five locations closed on November 1, 1999 – the first failure of Disney Regional Entertainment. Today, it's wild to imagine the Walt Disney Company – worth an estimated $270 billion – even trying to make strip mall family play centers work, but in the '90s, anything was possible...