Star Wars Is Disney’s New Hope to Transform Its Movie-Themed Park
Photo Credit: A Walt Disney employee signs a steel beam that will be the highest point in Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, the new land at Disney's Hollywood Studios. The land opens in late 2019. Walt Disney World Resort / Matt Stroshane
Skift Take
Disney's Hollywood Studios has been a work in progress for the last two decades. With Toy Story Land and Star Wars taking center stage, executives believe the park is finally coming into its own.
A little more than a year from now in a galaxy not far away, Disney's Hollywood Studios will open the gates to a much-anticipated new land full of smugglers, resistance fighters — and inevitably tourists — that executives hope will transform the park 20 years after it opened.
Transformation, in fact, was the buzzword at last week's opening of the park's most recent expansion, the 11-acre Toy Story Land.
“We’re taking a big step in the evolution of Disney’s Hollywood Studios as we transform it from a place that took you behind the scenes into one that actually puts you and your family at the center of the action,” said Bob Chapek, chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences, and Consumer Products, at a June 29 dedication event in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.
Kathy Mangum, Atlantic regional executive for Walt Disney Imagineering, continued the theme at a press event later that day.
“Toy Story Land is really just the beginning. We have started a multi-year transformation
