Based on executive statements and past precedent, there’s every reason to believe that Disneyland Abu Dhabi will open in the 2030s as opposed to 2029 or earlier. This post breaks down development and construction timelines for other new theme parks by Walt Disney Imagineering and Miral Group, discussing the unique challenges posed by this project in the United Arab Emirates, and predicting an opening month and date range.
The Walt Disney Company and Miral, Abu Dhabi’s leading creator of immersive destinations and experiences, announced an agreement to create a Disneyland Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The waterfront resort will be located on Yas Island, a world-class destination for entertainment and leisure, connecting travelers from the Middle East and Africa, India, Asia, Europe, and beyond. This seventh Disney theme park resort will combine Disney’s iconic stories, characters and attractions with Abu Dhabi’s vibrant culture, stunning shorelines, and breathtaking architecture.
As explained in Why Disney Picked United Arab Emirates for Its Next Castle Park, Disneyland Abu Dhabi will be fully funded, developed and built by Miral. Disney and its legendary Imagineers will lead creative design and operational oversight to provide a world-class experience. Miral, which has developed a number of family entertainment destinations on Yas Island, Abu Dhabi in collaboration with American and European brands, will operate the resort. Disneyland Abu Dhabi will be very similar to Tokyo Disney Resort, in that it provides revenue for Disney, as opposed to being another distraction from investments in Walt Disney World and Disneyland.
When it comes to predicting the timeline for Disneyland Abu Dhabi, what’s past is prologue. Which is to say that we can look at Disney and Miral’s most recent theme park projects for instruction. When it comes to Disney, it’s best not to scrutinize domestic additions that have been purposefully slow-rolled at Walt Disney World and Disneyland to spread costs over multiple fiscal years,
Instead, we should look internationally, specifically at projects that have been state-sponsored. This is because there is no incentive for Miral to delay Disneyland Abu Dhabi. In that regard, nowhere is more instructive than Shanghai Disneyland, the newest Disney park in the world.
Much like the idea of a Middle East park has been tossed around for years, Former CEO Michael Eisner began evaluating the viability of Shanghai in the 1990s, and got serious with a letter of intent in 2002 before Hong Kong Disneyland even opened.
Getting a deal done with the Chinese government was no easy process, and it took Eisner’s successor, Bob Iger, roughly two decades after the initial idea of entering the mainland to sign a deal to build Shanghai Disneyland, with partner Shendi owning a majority stake in the project. That agreement was approved by the Chinese government in November 2009, with the park announced a year later by Disney in November 2010. Construction began with a groundbreaking ceremony on April 7, 2011.
Originally scheduled to open in 2015, an additional $800 million investment was made due to cost overruns, delays, and/or to add capacity and entertainment. Reports of various problems, from the health of the workers on the construction project to talk of rebuilding certain elements due to shoddy construction, were tied to the project. As a result of these issues or others, the opening date of Shanghai Disneyland was delayed by roughly a year.
Shanghai Disneyland began soft openings in May 2016, and officially opened to the public on June 16, 2016, becoming the first Disney theme park in mainland China. From groundbreaking to grand opening, Shanghai Disneyland took a little over 5 years to build–but development was far longer.
Now let’s turn to the other projects that have come to fruition in the 15 years of Yas Island and the Miral Group. The first of these to open on the island was Ferrari World Abu Dhabi, with construction starting in November 2007. The park actually predates Miral, and was developed by Aldar Properties and built by Six Construct, taking roughly three years to build. It officially opened to the public on November 4, 2010. I couldn’t track down the official announcement of the park or when it began development.
Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi similarly began development in 2007 when Warner Bros. partnered with Aldar Properties. However, the project was delayed due to the global financial crisis. Some 8 years later, construction resumed in May 2015 after Miral took over the project, working again with Six Construct. Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi officially opened to the public on July 25, 2018.
Fast forward to December 2016, when SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment announced a partnership with Miral to develop a marine-life theme park on Yas Island. Construction commenced shortly thereafter, with the park not opening to the public until May 23, 2023. Of course, a global pandemic and tourism crash occurred in the middle of this one.
All told, I don’t find the timeline on any of these Miral or Yas Island projects all that instructive given that the Global Financial Crisis intervened shortly after two of them started, and COVID commenced during the other. Both had major impacts on the oil industry, construction, and travel. None of these timelines are reflective of how quickly work in the UAE can be achieved, but even if they were, Disneyland Abu Dhabi will presumably be closer to Shanghai Disneyland in terms of scale, scope and ambitiousness. That’s why we focused so much more on it.
In an interview with CNBC’s David Faber following the announcement, Disney CEO Bob Iger said that Imagineers have already begun designing the park. He declined to specify when the company expects Disneyland Abu Dhabi to open.
“Well we’re not pinning down a date yet. It typically takes between 18 months and 2 years to design and fully develop, and approximately 5 years to fully build, but we’re not making any commitments right now. Obviously we’re all very eager to get started. Actually, our Imagineers have already begun the process of design.”
“We’ve been in deep discussion with our partners at Miral. Who, I should also say, have proven to be great partners already. Another reason we’re here is finding the right partners and being able to negotiate the right deal. But we’re all very eager to get going. We’d love to be able to cut the ribbon as soon as possible, but we’re going to build this big and we’re going to build this right.”
As part of their media blitz, Disney Experiences Chairman Josh D’Amaro, told Reuters that a project of this scale could take a year or two to design, and another four to six years to build.
Miral initially approached Disney to talk about their plans for creating a tourism hub in Abu Dhabi, said D’Amaro. That conversation led Disney executives to visit the prospective theme park site last September.
“We saw where our potential park might go, and had some serious conversations about what this could mean to our ‘turbocharging’,” D’Amaro said. After a return trip to the region in February, D’Amaro said the parties entered into serious discussions that culminated in a deal.
Once complete, the resort will offer themed attractions, restaurants and retail, in a way that blends the Walt Disney Company’s storytelling and Abu Dhabi’s heritage, D’Amaro added. Disneyland Abu Dhabi will be authentically Disney and distinctly Emirati–a riff on the slogan for Shanghai Disneyland.
Finally, it’s our understanding that Miral has been working on the Disneyland Abu Dhabi proposal for at least 18 months.
In so doing, they have recruited former Imagineers and creative talent for the pitch to Disney, although it’s unclear just how much design work has been done and whether it was part of a package to illustrate the possibilities and excite executives, or if it’s practical work. Our guess is the former.
None of the above is surprising. The whole reason the concept art is so incredibly vague is because it doesn’t reflect the final vision for Disneyland Abu Dhabi. Instead, it looks like someone took old EPCOT Center concept art, painted Elsa’s ice palace on top of Spaceship Earth, added an ocean and some other brushstrokes.
That’s obviously not what actually happened, but the point is that the vaguer the art, the less likely it is to represent anything real. It’s vague for a reason–and not a matter of artistic license. Accordingly, I would strongly recommend not wasting your time trying to dissect what is what in it–that’s an exercise in futility.
The biggest impediment to design work taking the shorter end of that time range identified by Iger and D’Amaro is Imagineering.
From what we understand, the domestic projects that have been announced and are currently in development have been slow to move forward due to qualified and unique expertise at Imagineering. There’s a reason why old pitches, like the Monsters Inc. Door Coaster, have been dusted off the shelf and announced–because a lot of that work has already been done! It might be hard to believe, but this isn’t Disney’s typical lethargic pace–this time, there’s a desire to get this done faster, but an inability to do so.
Due to furloughs/layoffs during the closure, the ill-fated Lake Nona move and more, Imagineering hemorrhaged a lot of top talent–and institutional knowledge along with it–from 2020 through early 2023. Bruce Vaughn’s return started to reverse that and corrected course, but a lot of damage was done that is still being undone.
Imagineering is staffing up in a big way and is back on track. As we’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions, WDI now has its largest-ever presence on-site at Walt Disney World. But lost institutional knowledge isn’t regained overnight, especially when most of the old-timers who retired (or “retired”) don’t return.
Given this, it wouldn’t surprise me if many of those old-timer Imagineers are lured out of retirement for Disneyland Abu Dhabi. For a project of this scale and scope, Imagineering really needs to staff back up in Glendale, hiring creatives who have worked on the parks in Paris, Tokyo, or China. They need the boomers who have done this before, not people my age or younger who are wet behind the ears and getting their first big break. Give them that on a less consequential project, like a new bar at Walt Disney World.
There’s a long list of former Imagineers who would happily return under the right circumstances or for the right price. Some who were pushed out due to internal infighting and corporate politics who may come back for this–not necessarily to the Walt Disney Company, but to Miral Group.
If the goal is to get Disneyland Abu Dhabi off the ground ASAP, it would similarly make sense for Imagineering to dust-off old ideas that have already had a lot of creative and design work completed. To the surprise of no one, the first place my mind went with this is Tony Baxter finally being brought back to create a new version of Journey into Imagination with Figment and Dreamfinder. I don’t think that’ll actually happen, but what a plot twist that would be in the long-running saga of will they or won’t they with a new version of the EPCOT attraction.
Other Disney theme park fans will likely salivate at the prospect of their favorite shelved projects being revived for Disneyland Abu Dhabi. I’d just advise not getting too carried away with that.
While I would expect this park to have big swings and Imagineers able to convince Miral to build a couple of original attractions, it’ll mostly be intellectual property. Miral did this deal for the Disney name and characters.
If they simply wanted the top talent of Imagineering to create original lands and attractions, they could’ve gotten that without this deal. There’s a dream team of unemployed ex-Imagineers they could’ve hired (see above).
Another challenge to the design process is going to be finding clever ways to make Disneyland Abu Dhabi largely indoors, but with a sufficient amount of outdoor space to create beautiful vistas and environments. That’s going to be very difficult.
This is not something Imagineering has done before. They usually design for California, and if those projects don’t work for other climates, oh well! That won’t be the attitude here–because it cannot be the attitude.
This means that they’ll probably need people with expertise from Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, where the weather is more extreme and (usually) projects are designed for that. Even so, none of those climates are like Abu Dhabi. This is going to have to be much more indoors, and that’ll present new challenges. Good challenges, and ones that force Imagineering to think outside the box and get creative. But that’ll result in a longer design process.
Then there’s construction. Our best guess is that will also take longer than anticipated.
Miral has a track record with three theme parks in Abu Dhabi already, which is good. But it’s fair to say that none of those are Disney quality in terms of the depth of design and detail.
One of the difficulties Disney encountered with Shanghai Disneyland was the lack of a labor force with specialized skills and expertise. Sure, construction happens at lightning speed in China as contrasted with the United States, but they’re not building ornately-detailed theme parks. At the risk of stating the obvious, skyscrapers aren’t the same as Shanghai Pirates. The skillset doesn’t necessarily translate, which is why work had to be redone and there were cost overruns on Shanghai Disneyland.
Ultimately, all of this is to say that our view is that Bob Iger and Josh D’Amaro both presented overly optimistic and rosy timelines for the construction of Disneyland Abu Dhabi. The design phase is probably going to span the longer end of that range, and I’d be surprised to see a groundbreaking on this project before 2027. And if it doesn’t happen prior to then, it’ll likely be ceremonial.
There’s also reason to believe construction will take at least 5 years, if not longer. Even though skyscrapers and entire cities are built with record speed in the Middle East, Disneyland Abu Dhabi isn’t those. It’s different and will require unique expertise. There will probably be problems along the way and delays.
That’s all normal and to be expected, especially if this project is given the budget it deserves–but it also means this project will take at least 8 years, and maybe over a decade to bring to life.
Disneyland Abu Dhabi does present an opportunity for Imagineering and Miral Group to get creative and bring to life long-lost ambitious projects that couldn’t get funding for Walt Disney World or Disneyland. Who among us doesn’t salivate at the prospect of DisneySky or Discovery Bay finally coming to fruition?! While those specific concepts probably won’t happen, there is an unprecedented opportunity for the creatives to make something special in the United Arab Emirates–it’s just going to take time to “let them cook.”
Here’s my precise prediction: Disneyland Abu Dhabi opens in November 2033. As for a broader range, I’ll go with Disney’s seventh park arriving in the UAE sometime between March 2032 and December 2036 (barring no global economic crises between now and then). My gut is that it’s more likely to be at the later end of that spectrum than the earlier side. This is another project that’s much more likely to take longer than anticipated than be done ahead of schedule.
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Your Thoughts
When do you think Disneyland Abu Dhabi will open? How long until groundbreaking? Will construction on this park start before or after Tropical Americas at Animal Kingdom debuts? Do you think we’ll see a new castle park in our lifetimes after Disneyland Abu Dhabi? Hope this UAE park project brings former Imagineers out of retirement or “retirement”? Agree or disagree with our analysis on the timeline? Any other questions or thoughts to share?