THINK. Believe. Dream. Dare.
“First, think. Second, believe. Third, dream. And finally, dare.”
Walt Disney
AVENGERS CAMPUS
Disney's California Adventure
ATTRACTION CONCEPT AND DESIGN
First announced at D23 way back in 2022, the current iteration of the Avengers campus expansion has been something of a slow burn project. The subsequent announcement at D23 in 2024 revealed that two new attractions would join Webslingers and the wildly popular Guardians of the Galaxy - Mission Breakout on the campus, with Avengers Infinity Defense and the Stark Flight Lab.
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AVENGERS INFINITY DEFENSE
​We're still likely a couple of years out from joining the battle against Thanos, but based on the early concept art, it looks like Avengers Infinity Defense could be something like a next-generation Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man at Universal Islands of Adventure. For me, that's an exciting starting point as I would rate Spider-Man as one of the best attractions in Orlando. Indeed, when I first rode it, I think it was maybe the best ride I had been on at that time. ​​
A more contemporary reference is Peter Pan's Never Land Adventure from Tokyo DisneySea, which opened as part of the Fantasy Springs expansion in 2024. The reviews of that ride have been somewhat mixed, though without having experienced the ride myself, I am inclined to believe that Tom over at Disney Tourist Blog might be on to something when he suggests that a lot of this negativity could be due to an inherent bias against anything with a screen, and especially the fact that 3D rides are particularly hard to judge via someone else's YouTube clips (not all Disney reviewers have the ability to pop over to Tokyo as they do with the US parks). Anyway, that ride system seems to look a lot like the ones we have seen in several recent Imagineering videos, including the "Let's Ride" episode of We Call It Imagineering (which also appears to confirm the attraction will be 3D).​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
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​We know from the D23 presentation that the ride will have guests travel to various worlds, such as Asgard and Wakanda, and ​so the ride vehicle (and combination of screens and show scenes) we see at DisneySea's Peter Pan ride looks like a good match to allow quick transitions between worlds/scenes. Something the Imagineers talk about in the aforementioned "Let's Ride" episode of We Call it Imagineering, is that the omni-directional ride vehicles - whether a simpler version like doom buggies or what we are looking at here - allow them to pack more content and ride scenes into a show building, because you can transition from scene to scene more quickly by simply turning the guest away from whatever scene you no longer want them to focus on. While this is all true, it doesn't however mean that these show buildings can be small, as we'll get to later in looking at where on property this attraction might live.​​​​​
STARK FLIGHT LAB
The concept art for Stark Flight Lab suggests that Imagineers are finally going to get a fully fledged attraction which uses "Kuka arm" technology. I'm not sure if this tech is literally from Kuka but it's certainly comparable to the robotic arm which has been rumoured for inclusion at Disney parks for almost 20 years (of course, the technology did feature on a smaller scale at Epcot's Sum of All Thrills within Innoventions, which ran between 2009 and 2016). For context, way back in 2007, while reporting on Universal securing the exclusive rights to use Harry Potter in their parks, the great Jim Hill noted that some folks at Imagineering were possibly more disappointed by Universal securing exclusive rights to the so-called Kuka arm technology, which Disney folks had hoped to use on their own Harry Potter attraction. Universal would go on to bring that pair together with both Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey and more recently at Epic Universe with Monsters Unchained.
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From the announcement video it looks like Disney have solved one issue they had initially encountered, namely the ability for the arm to "pickup" a ride vehicle and drop it somewhere else. The D23 announcement video suggests that the ride vehicles will be on a loop that will allow guests to load and unload from their two person vehicle while others are on the ride. This should help with ride capacity, and the fixed arms should mean that the footprint for this attraction can be relatively small. They also confirmed at D23 that the ride will be designed so that different superheroes accompany you on your test mission, which will add an element of re-rideability to the attraction.
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There seems to have been something of a lukewarm reception to the proposed plan for Avengers campus, and some of that seems to stem from the fact that these two attractions are both based on existing technology rather than something brand new. While this is undoubtedly true, I'd argue that immersive 3D attractions like Spider-Man, Flight of Passage, or Peter Pan's Never Land Adventure still hold up as some of the best attractions in their respective parks. As for the Stark Flight Lab, to me it looks like a fairly clever way to utilize what is presumably a relatively small show building while still delivering a "thrill ride" that will appeal to the typical Marvel-fan demographic. As we'll get to shortly, land is especially limited at Disneyland and so - at least until Disneyland Forward opens up a new area in the west-side parking lots - attractions need to be extremely conscious of space, meaning another Pandora, Galaxy's Edge, or Radiator Springs is really hard to accommodate.
LOCATION
Adding new - rather than replacing existing - attractions within any land at the Disneyland Resort is generally difficult as there aren't the extra acres of land that can sometimes be utilized over at Disney World. That said, Avengers Campus does have a parcel of land adjacent to it, which could support quite a large expansion.
RETAIL / FOOD & BEVERAGE
Web Slingers
MISSION: BREAKOUT
POSSIBLE EXPANSION PAD
RED TROLLEY BARN (DEMOLISHED)
Concept art should not be confused for architectural drawings, but for a project like this - which has been in development for some time, and has a well defined area to go in the park - I think we can probably draw some fairly concrete inferences from it:
Web Slingers
MISSION: BREAKOUT
PYM TEST KITCHEN
WEB SUPPLIERS
STARK FLIGHT LAB
AVENGERS INFINITY DEFENSE
ANIMATION BUILDING
The pictured building for the two new attractions is huge in the above artwork. For context, the Animation Building on the left (which holds the Animation Academy, Turtle Talk etc) in Hollywood Land is 40,000 square feet, and the Stark Flight Lab alone looks to be bigger than that (again, with the caveat that this isn't all necessarily to scale).
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It isn't easy to see in the above version, but if we zoom in, we see that the Avengers Infinity Defense building not only seems to go further East that Mission Breakout (which in this picture means further towards the horizon) but also seems to stretch way down to the south (to the right in the picture) which would suggest it is utilizing a very healthy part of the expansion pad shown earlier.
As we noted above, one possible point of reference is the Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man at Islands of Adventure. For fun, if we overlay that massive (70,000+ square feet) show building into our expansion pad, we can see that it would take up a large chunk of it, but if we elongated it as in the concept art, this looks like it could be approximately the kind of building we are looking at:
SIZE OF AMAZING ADVENTURES OF SPIDER-MAN
POSSIBLE EXPANSION PAD
As a reminder, the Amazing Adventures of Spider-man is not only incredible (see this equally amazing history of the attraction here from Park Lore), but it also offers excellent value for guests' time, as they are treated to five minutes of non-stop action as they spin and crash around the various show scenes.
This location is one of the last couple of obvious expansion areas at Disney's California Adventure, after which future rides will need to replace something that already exists, or else expand into the area on the other side of Disneyland Drive as part of the much heralded Disney Forward proposal.
TIMELINE AND PROGRESS
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
2027
2028
Announcement of campus expansion
D23 2022 (Disney Parks Blog)
Ground cleared and foundation work begun
CONSTRUCTION UPDATES
2025
AUG
Google Earth has been updated and we can see not only the cleared area - confirming that the entire back stage area is indeed in play - but also the actual outline of the buildings.
Based on the concept art, I think we can maybe assume that the outline we see here is primarily for the Avengers Infinity Defense show building, and the Stark Flight Lab will fill the space which is currently empty. Tommy Hawkins over at BlueSky suggests the two show buildings could look something like the below:
Tommy has a great thread on this which also speculate that at least a portion of the Avengers building will be taller, and those black curved areas have deeper foundations which could suggest a "drop" element, perhaps like scene in Rise of the Resistance where our vehicle makes it escape into space.
2025
AUG
Imagineering shared an update that the project is "going vertical" although it's hard to glean anything of interest from a few folks stood in a pile of dirt. Still, it's good to at least hear that we're moving to the next phase of development, even if we can't quite yet see it for ourselves.
Luckily, FreshBaked had a closer look and was able to share a view where we actually see some really promising progress. It looks like a good portion of the framework to one of the buildings is up, and things should only get more interesting from here.
2025
JUN
FreshBaked over on YouTube gave us our first real update of construction here, with a shot of the area behind the Luigi's Rollickin' Roadsters queue building looking pretty well levelled. It isn't 100% clear from this view but it looks like the majority of that backstage area is indeed being cleared, as we speculated above. We can see that the area in front of the first two buildings is definitely clear, and it looks like this potentially extends all the way down to "building 3" which we can see in the below aerial view means that the land allocated to this expansion is significant.
Building #1
Building #2
Building #3
