Everyone who has been to a Disney park has their favorite ride – even Josh D’Amaro, Chairman of Disney Experiences.
Well, it’s hard to pick one from the 70 years of what Walt Disney dubbed imagineering that have created some of the most memorable themed rides on the planet. That cultural impact is part of why D’Amaro was back in Austin for the second time in two years to present The Future of World-Building at Disney, a South by Southwest featured session. But for the man who oversees the Disney parks business from rope drop to the final recorded farewell, picking a favorite ride gets tricky. “That is an unfair question,” D’Amaro laughs, “because the imagineers listen to everything I say.”
From the more modern additions to the parks, that’s an easy choice. Nah, it’s not. “We have so many new, great attractions. Rise of the Resistance in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, arguably one of the most complex attractions we’ve ever built but the most immersive from a storytelling perspective. Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind in EPCOT. If you have not been on that, you absolutely have to. So much technology used for such deep storytelling, such a deep thrill.”
“I’m glad you didn’t ask me about movies,” chimed in Alan Bergman. As Co-Chairman of Disney Entertainment, he’s engaged with every aspect of the company ,but having grown up 20 minutes from Disneyland he knows the Anaheim parks like his own childhood home. On the classics side, it’s the Matterhorn, but in the contemporary side it’s Pirates of the Caribbean – or, more specifically, the version of Pirates in Shanghai Disneyland Park. “As someone who worked on the first Pirates, to see it come to life like that, was spectacular.”
Dividing the park rides between the classics and the contemporary isn’t simply about changing technologies and expectations from audiences. Park guests aren’t always lured in by the newest and shiniest, leading to the old joke/observation that, it doesn’t matter what new attractions are added, the longest line is for Space Mountain.
What’s really changed is the integration between the different divisions. When the original Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, the park team didn’t have character costumes, so they had to borrow some from the Ice Capades. These days, the parks aren’t likely to be caught off guard like that ever again. “Alan and I are literally talking every single day,” said D’Amaro. “As he’s conceiving of new directions he’s going to take or speaking with his team, it’s automatically coming over to me and I’m getting excited talking about my engineers. So at the kernel of an idea, the attachment has already started.”
“It’s not just us,” Bergman added. “Our teams are very much in contact with each other all the time.”
Imagine that Pixar Chief Creative Officer and Monsters, Inc. director Pete Docter starts working on a sequel or a new story. D’Amaro said, “My team, the imagineering team, is in there with him, talking about the spaces that he’s going to create, the characters he’s going to bring to life, how that’s going to translate into the theme park experience of the cruise ship experience.”
That Unreal union was strengthened last year when Disney bought a $1.5 billion equity stake in Epic. D’Amaro added that he had recently spent time with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, “and what we are building inside of Epic Games, inside the Fortnite community … absolutely stunning.”
However, not every Disney movie or franchise gets its own ride or land. The process of deciding why guests can enjoy a classic pretzel ride on Mister Toad’s Wild Ride but there’s no attraction for The Jungle Book is more art than science. Sometimes those decisions come from conversations with Bergman and his team. If a project just feels right, D’Amaro said, “We’re willing to make a bet with our guests. We know our fans, we know that community really well, and so we’ll take some big swings.”
Having early access to what the film and TV team is thinking can be essential, not just for the parks division but also for the consumer side of the business. Luckily, Bergman explained, “We plan pretty far in advance. So if you were to see, for example, our animation slate, it goes year out. It may not be that exact year but there’s a lot of lead time.”
Having that integration means that, when The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens in cinemas on July 25, there will already be a screen-accurate character meet-and-greet at Disneyland, and D’Amaro’s imagineers are already working on a working version of H.E.R.B.I.E., the team’s faithful robotic assistant.
Or take the next big addition to the Star Wars franchise, The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is scheduled to be released May 22, 2026. During the SXSW presentation, Bergman and D’Amaro were joined by The Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau, who revealed that there will be a Mando-themed revamp to the popular Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run flight simulator. D’Amaro said, “Day and date, when that film hits, that experience will make its way into the theme parks.”
But the first guidance for any new rides, reskins, or attractions often comes from the audience. It’s not always instantaneous: It took 34 years between the release of Tron and the first launch for the Tron Lightcycle Power Run coaster. Similarly, six years after Iron Man signed off in Avengers: Endgame, Robert Downey Jr. dropped by the panel to announce that a new attraction, Stark Flight Lab, is now planned for Disney California Adventure’s Avengers Campus. D’Amaro said, “We hear from people, ‘I love Tron, I love Frozen, I love Cars,’ [and] if we were to build something against that franchise, or extend that franchise into the theme parks, then it’s absolutely going to be a great hit.’”
There are few businesses even approaching the cultural ubiquity of Disney. That means that every decision comes under immense scrutiny before it’s even been made. There’s a veritable cottage industry of Disney vloggers and bloggers analyzing everything from wait times to menu changes. They’ll have diverse opinions, as shown in the retheming of the Song of the South-inspired Splash Mountain to Tianna’s Bayou Adventure, which gave Disney’s first Black princess her own ride. Some fans were mad they messed with a classic, others wondered how it took so long. Bergman said, “It’s a constant reminder that whatever we do has to be great, and we’re not going to stop until we make it as great as we can. We don’t always get it right, but our track record is pretty good.”
But when the team hits the sweet spot, there’s nothing like that Disney moment because it’s so personal, like D’Amaro remembering sitting with his dad and being told he could fly, or Bergman getting to sail through the Pirates he helped put on the screen. The morning of their presentation at SXSW, Bergman was getting on to the elevator. There was a family and one of their children was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Bergman asked if he’d been to Disneyland, and the toddler corrected him. “He goes, ‘Walt Disney World!’ and this is a tiny little kid, with his T-shirt on, and a big smile on his face,” he said “So you can see what it does to people.”
“We’re not curing cancer,” he continued, “but we are doing an admirable thing. We’re bringing joy to the world.”
Catch up with all of The Austin Chronicle‘s SXSW 2025 coverage.
This article appears in March 14 • 2025.