COCO

Disney's California Adventure

Attraction Concept

COCO in the Disney Parks

Imagineers have clearly been trying to find ways to get Coco into the parks pretty much since its first reviews dropped back in 2017. It's sometimes possibly underappreciated that Coco is the sixth highest (non-sequel) grossing Disney/Pixar animated movie, only behind tent pole franchises like Frozen, Zootopia, The Lion King, Finding Nemo, and Inside Out. The first four of those movies in particular have seen significant investments in the parks around the world, with multiple attractions, shows, and meet and greets, and in some cases entire lands themed to that particular property.

We've seen bits of Coco in the parks, with a new sequence added to Mickey's Philharmagic, the Plaza de la Familia show in California Adventure that runs to coincide with the annual día de los muertos celebration, and of course appearances in various parades, but this will be the first stand-alone attraction we have seen. Given Coco's popularity (including in key international markets), the stunning visuals from the movie, and a thematic design that would allow it to appropriately fit in many theme parks lands around the world, it is a bit surprising it will end up being a decade until we see an attraction from the time the movie debuted.

A re-theme of the Gran Fiesta Tour in EPCOT's Mexico pavilion has long been rumoured and almost assumed to be getting a Coco treatment at some point, and the fact we are getting a boat ride here will likely re-ignite those discussions. However, without digressing too much here, the size and existing popularity of existing Mexico pavilion is always going to be a major challenge there. The Mexico pavilion includes not just the Gran Fiesta tour boat ride but also a very popular sit-down restaurant (San Angel Inn) and bar (La Cava del Tequila) along with a faux-market and other retail space. The Gran Fiesta tour is a fun little ride but doesn't attract the kind of crowds that needs a major queue space, which would be required if Coco did to Mexico what Frozen did to Norway. The ambience of the pavilion - particularly for the San Angel Inn - is one of romance, and even if Disney were willing to give up retail space for a queue, it would potentially upset the whole balance of what is already one of the most popular pavilions. As always, there are creative ways this problem could be fixed - the queue could potentially snake out the back of the pavilion into what is now back stage areas close to Test Track, but suffice to say that I wouldn't necessarily assume that we can copy-paste this Disneyland attraction into EPCOT just yet.

ATTRACTION DESIGN AND STORY

Before we can even think about copying the attraction to other parks, we should probably scope out what exactly the attraction is. As I first write this, we don't know much beyond that the two pieces of concept art that came with the original announcement. Based on the movie upon which it is based, the ride vehicles pictured in the concept art, and the space in which the ride will go (see more later on), we can probably assume:

This is likely to be a classic Pirates / Small World style boat ride rather than a next-generation Battle for the Sunken Treasure style attraction which many are expecting for the new Avatar land.
The movie's music and gorgeous visuals will be the main star of the show and so we'll likely want a slower ride so that musicals queues can align with boats as they travel through different scenes.
Imagineers will employ their bag-of-tricks from attractions like the haunted mansion to lean into the somewhat "spooky" elements of the narrative, with dancing skeletons, ghostly figures etc.

The iconography, story, and cultural significance of día de los muertos is incredible, and offers an incredibly rich design toolkit to draw from. The stylized calaveras (skulls), the papel picardo banners, the marigolds, and the alebrijes (brightly coloured, mythical creatures) are all iconic visuals and simply riding through a Mexican town during this celebration would make a good attraction, even without the additional narrative of the Coco characters.

California Adventure is no longer aiming to give guests a "Californian" experience and Disney isn't perhaps as interested in providing an educational element to its parks as it once arguably was, but this attraction can nevertheless serve as both a wonderful recognition of an essential part of the California culture (in 2021, 29% of California's identified as having historic ties to Mexico), as well as an introduction into a beautiful celebration which deals with a difficult subject (which is possibly why the movie resonated with so many).

LOCATION

Once the pieces began to fall into place that the new Avatar land would take over the northeast corner of the park, and that Coco was clearly being fast tracked ("Plans are drawn. Dirt is moving"), it became fairly clear that this new boat ride was going to slot somewhere around the Incredicoaster. This was of course confirmed by the June 2025 announcement which locked in those two announcements. Specifically for Coco we learned that it:

"will be built near Paradise Gardens Park and Pixar Pier, in areas that are predominantly backstage today. Construction on this attraction is set to begin backstage this fall" (Disney Parks Blog)

My initial reading of this - and I still think the most likely outcome - was that this means that the Coco attraction (and presumably accompanying restaurant / plaza) was destined for the area south of the Incredicoaster, taking over the three large backstage buildings currently in that area (the largest of which is used to stage parade floats). To avoid the squeeze at the north west end of that plot of land, I wonder if Disney will push out the backstage access road (grey) and vegetation barrier (green) to hug Disneyland Drive more closely, and free up just that bit of extra real estate

Parade Route Access

Pixar PIER

Parade Building

Proposed Access Road and vegetation barrier

On the face of it this (yellow highlight) looks like a huge area of land, so problem solved, right? Well, a couple of issues immediately arise. First, we are losing the parade float storage building so that will presumably need adding back somewhere, and second, - again assuming we want to continue to have the option of parades - we'll need a route to get those floats from back stage into the parks, as we're currently encroaching on that space. This seems like a solvable problem though, as there should be enough space in this area to create a new building to house the parade floats (which is presumably cheap to build as just an empty warehouse) and an access road that can either be hidden behing show elements, or even under them as suggested by Hey Brickey: In that same video, Hey Brickey also suggests an alternative location for Coco to the north - taking over the Boardwalk Pizza and Pasta location - which is an interesting idea too.

So if we do indeed have this yellow space to play with - less whatever we need to solve the parade problem - what kind of attraction could we expect to see? If we take a cue from the quintessential slow-but-visually-beautiful boat ride - it's a small world - then we should need somewhere around 70,000 square feet for the show building.

Here's how a ~70,000 square foot show building would look in our space:

70,000 sqft buidling

At first glance, this looks about right. There would be room for additional dining and retail to make this a mini-land or "neighbourgood" while still I think giving enough flexibility to do something which can maintain the parade route through the back stage.

Alternatively, I wonder if we could preserve the existing parade building and access road and bury the Coco attraction deeper in the southern edge of the park. The parade floats could either come out of the existing doorway (which is typically just used by guests, who would need re-routing during the parade), or they would even create an elevated walkway heading up from near Symphony Swings and over where the parade floats could then access the park at street level.

At first glance, this looks like it could work too. That parade building and access road could be walled off and the building could be blended into the background with some appropriate theming. Indeed, having a large building between the new Coco land and Incredicoaster might be beneficial to give some separation from the sometimes loud attraction.

One final element I would really like to see in this new Coco land is for them to really lean into the nighttime appeal of the land, as we have with Radiator Springs on the other side of the park, or with the Pandora at the Animal Kingdom. This wouldn't just be about being fun at night with entertainment and available drinks, but potentially designing the entire mini-land to seamlessly transform into a dia de los muertos celebration at the flick of switch thanks to the lighting package and well placed skulls which come to life under neon or black light. Such is the appeal of this celebration, UNESCO made of the inaugural Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity awardees and it's popularity around the world is really growing. Indeed, after being featured in the James Bond movie Spectre, Mexico City added a special celebration for the holiday due to demand and 250,000 people showed up. The food, the merchandise, the connection to Californian culture, and a link to Disney IP makes this seem like an irresistible move!

Finally, as Hey Brickey details here, in many ways this can be seen as one of the first steps towards Disneyland Forward. By moving the access road and vegetation barrier closure to Disneyland Drive, Disney can also start prepping that area - on paper if not yet in concrete - for a time when the park will spillover the road and into what is now the Simba parking lot. Disney are going to have to figure out how to get to the western edge of the park and then over Disneyland Drive in the near future, and we might well get clues how they plan to do that as work begins in that area of the park in the coming months.

TIMELINE AND PROGRESS

Construction is slated to begin in the "fall of 2025" but otherwise updates have been scarce. We'll add the latest updates when we have them.