61. Euro Disney

by Diana S. |
Mickey and friends standing in front of the castle at Euro Disney

It’s that time of year – les vacances! Oh, wait, you’re stuck at home? No big international trips? Global pandemic got you grounded? Yeah, me too. My favorite summer destination, Disneyland, is closed for COVID, and it’ll be a long time until it reopens. When it does, it won’t be the same. It’ll be an uncanny valley effect, where everything seems like the Disneyland you know and love, but when you look at it long enough, it’s not quite right. It will be a little off-center. It will be a little sad. And it’ll be empty, way too empty for Disneyland.

In other words, it’ll be just like…Euro Disney.

Episode 61: “Euro Disney”

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Transcript

Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and it’s August, aka les vacances, that five week period when seemingly all of France closes up shop, heads out of town, and goes on holiday. Oh, wait. What’s that? A global pandemic’s got you grounded. Yeah, me too. Gotta say, after almost six months in my tiny studio apartment, quarantine life is really getting to me these days, especially because I know exactly where I’d rather be right now. Usually at this time of year, my partner and I visit Disneyland for a long weekend. It’s one of my happy places, combining all my favorite things: zippy rollercoasters, childhood nostalgia, phenomenal amounts of sugar, and for those who know, tiki drinks. These days, of course, it’s a different story. Not even Mickey is enjoying a summer at Disneyland in this cursed summer. Disneyland has closed only 3 times in its history: the assassination of JFK, the Northridge Earthquake, and September 11th. Who knows when the park will reopen? When it does, it won’t be the same. It’ll be an uncanny valley effect, where everything seems like the Disneyland you know and love, but when you look at it long enough, it’s not quite right. It will be a little off-center. It will be a little sad. And it’ll be empty, way too empty for Disneyland. In other words, it’ll be just like…Euro Disney.
 
Oh, Euro Disney. One of the worst mistakes in Disney history, the blunder that kept on blundering. Now known as Disneyland Paris, this wild misadventure is literally a case study in business schools around the world. It’s a perfect lesson in hubris, the sunk cost fallacy and the importance of localization. This month, let’s learn about the history that Disney would rather have you forget. We’ve got angry farmers protesting on tractors, a beet root field gone bad, surprise ketchup attacks, a bombing that everybody forgot, and the disastrous results of hiring French waiters to deliver American-style customer service. Time to grab a ticket – and don’t worry, there are a lot of them left – and take a ride to the Not-So-Happiest Place On Earth. Welcome to Euro Disney.
 
 
As the year 1991 drew to a close, the Mouse was King. Hard as it is for Millennials like myself to believe, Disney spent most of the 70s in the cultural doldrums. By 1984, finance groups were trying to take the company over, and movie studios could say, with a straight face, things like “Disney has been on the fringes lately.” But a bright new CEO, Michael Eisner, was determined to turn the ship around. Step one? Get more money out of the assets we have. All those beloved Disney movies of the past would be freed from the company vault and released on VHS – and if you’re between the ages of about 25 and 35, I know you can feel that plastic clamshell case in your mind right now, so, good move there, dude. Step two? Make more classics. In 1989, Disney released The Little Mermaid, its first massive box office hit in ages. By the end of 1991, Beauty and the Beast was hitting the theaters, and Aladdin was wrapping up production. Step three? Parks, baby. Parks. At 20 years old, Walt Disney World was booming, with twice as many visitors in the 90s as it used to see in the 80s. Disneyland was as reliable as ever, bringing in a steady 12 million visitors every year. But Disney had taken a massive bet in the 1980s and boy had it paid off: to everyone’s surprise, Tokyo Disneyland was a smash hit. Despite the expensive construction, despite the cultural barriers and the language barriers, Japan simply couldn’t get enough. With Japan’s economy booming for the first time since World War II, the park was a jackpot for Disney. Tokyo Disneyland saw more visitors in 1991 than Disneyland or Disney World, and for Eisner, this was all the encouragement he needed to tackle the next big, untapped market: Europe. By the time the first box office receipts came back to headquarters, Eisner had sent out his first scouts. Now, as 1991 wound down to a close, his grand dream was about to come true. Euro Disney was coming, and it was going to be his greatest triumph yet.
 
When Disney scouts first began seeking out suitable locations for a European theme park, two countries jumped to the top of the list: Spain and France. Spain’s appeal was obvious: just like California and Florida, it boasted beautiful weather all-year round. But Tokyo Disneyland proved that good weather wasn’t necessarily a prerequisite for success. France had other appealing qualities – namely, that it was the world’s most popular vacation destination. Everybody was already packing their bags and hopping flights to Paris, so why not meet the tourists where they were? But France didn’t just offer the allure of international tourists. In 1982, as part of a negotiation between the French government and her biggest labor unions, French workers received a fifth week of paid leave – nobody on earth had more incentive or means to take the family on vacation. But in typical fashion, France saw its early advantage and managed to blow it.
 
By 1985, four years into the location scouting process, the French delegation was in shambles. Everyone was arguing over the proposals, fighting about which site to suggest, and whether the train would go there, and who would pay for the train, and how fast would the train go, and on and on and on. Meanwhile, Spain, which had only recently been freed from the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, leapt at the opportunity. In the midst of applying for EU membership, eager to demonstrate their economic maturity, Spain promised Disney the world. Anything they wanted, Spain would give it. it was a hard offer for the bickering French to beat. At one point, one unlucky French delegate flew to Disney HQ to deliver a presentation, only to be met with complete, stony silence. At this point, the Spanish delegation started high-fiving one another. But as always, when it comes to real estate decisions, there’s only one factor that matters: location, location, location. The first site Spain had proposed, situated on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, sounded perfect. Perfect, that is, until Disney scouts visited in the off-season, and found themselves blown around by crazy seasonal winds, which lasted for weeks on end. Alright, Spanish officials insisted, what about Barcelona? Beautiful, tourist-friendly Barcelona, which was getting ready to host the Olympics in 1992!  Unfortunately, in 1985 Spain was in the middle of a fight against the terrorist organization ETA. After ETA carried out a car bombing in Madrid that killed an American citizen, Disney began looking at the French proposal with new interest. In typical fashion, the French were only able to overcome their differences when faced with a common enemy. At last, the French delivered a solid proposal.
 
“Look, everybody already knows and loves and visits Paris, right? 50 million people came to see us this year. They spent $21 billion while they were in town – trust us, they’re going to spend money on Mickey Mouse ears. And remember, we all just got that fifth week of vacation. We know just the place, this little village outside Paris, there’s tons of space to build. We’ll kick the farmers off ourselves. We’ll build a train to the place, and we’ll pay for that ourselves. We’ll cut your taxes. We’ll sell you the land for cheap. We won’t charge you real property taxes for the next twenty years. We will loan you seven hundred million dollars, just please, s’il vous plait, bring us le Mickey.”
 
It was an offer Disney couldn’t refuse. On December 15, 1985 Disney signed a letter of intent with the French prime minister. Euro Disney was coming, and it was coming to France.
 
 
The tiny, ancient village of Chessy is a perfect case study in 20th century European urban planning. Chessy, aka “Cheese” was a tiny little hamlet about twenty miles from Paris. For most of its ancient existence, Chessy consisted of little more than a scattering of farms, a church, a school and a road. Chessy was a town you passed through on the way to your real destination. During the French Revolution, Chessy had a population of 332. By the end of World War II, it had a population of 323. But following World War II, Europe experienced a massive population migration, which would shape Chessy in unexpected ways. World War II put an end to the old world. Nobody wanted to be a farmer anymore. Nobody wanted to live in the sticks. All around the world, young men and women were leaving their ancestral homes and heading to city centers in search of jobs and a bit more excitement. Aging farmers weren’t the only ones concerned by this migration, though. Urban planners saw Europe’s great cities, still struggling to rebuild, now straining at the seams. The city limits of London, Paris, and other major population centers seemed to expand further and further away. So these urban planners began looking at those abandoned farming villages with a new idea in mind: what if we turned those dusty nowheresvilles into new cities? Beautiful, planned cities, with all the amenities and infrastructure needed to support the population sensibly? Standing in Chessy in 1950, urban planners would be able to see all the way to Paris with almost nothing in between but beet fields, dusty roads, and the banks of the Marne river. It was perfect! A nearly blank slate. During the 1950s and 1960s, house after house went up on the river banks. After one thousand years as a pit stop, Chessy began to take on a new identity: voila, the French suburb. Things were going well, and in the late 1960s, urban planners set their sights on one enormous beet field in particular, on the fringes of the fringes, the perfect place to do some massive scale building. Unfortunately, at that moment, the oil crisis of 1973 brought any building plans to a halt. The beet roots sat abandoned. That is, until Disney arrived.
 
In August 1988, Disney broke ground on the new theme park site. It was their most ambitious construction project yet. While Tokyo Disneyland had essentially replicated the best parts of Disneyland and Disney World, Eisner planned to do something new with these beet fields. He was going to learn from the mistakes of his predecessors and, most importantly, he was not going to leave any money on the table. In Tokyo, Disney was so nervous they sold the rights to everything, and just collected royalties. No hotel revenues, nothing – enough to make an accountant sweat. In Orlando, there was enough room for everyone to build a hotel, and Disney owned only 14 percent of the rooms in town. So this time, Disney thought big. Euro Disney would be huge. The park complex would include 7 hotels, offering 5,200 rooms, along with thousands of square feet of office space, a golf course, and 570 homes. And that was just the beginning. What about the park? What would make Euro Disney special? Unique? What would make it European?
 
Some parts of the park would stay the same, of course: there’d be a Main Street, and a Frontierland and an Adventureland. But lots of elements would change. As millions of tourists have discovered during ill-timed vacations, it rains in Paris, a lot. Water rides like Splash Mountain were out. Put a roof over the queues. But it wasn’t a matter of practical differences, there were cultural differences which had to be addressed. First and foremost? Fewer castles. Waaaaay fewer castles. Americans might be awed and amazed by Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, but the castle it was based on was about 8 hours away by train for most Parisians. Why pay money to gape at fake castles when the real deal was down the road? Still, you gotta have one castle, and Disney built one that was truly fantastical, and they spared no expense, using stained glass made from the same studio which had just restored the windows of Notre Dame Cathedral.
 
Euro Disney also offered a unique challenge that Disney’s architects had never had to contend with before: snow. Walkways had to be covered, doorways needed real doors, and everything needed central heating. One winter’s afternoon, Eisner froze during a tour of the grounds and ducked into the lobby of one of the recently completed hotels. Warming himself by the fireplaces while he watched the snow outside, he made a note. “We gotta get one of these in all the hotels. And the restaurants. Fireplaces everywhere.” That’s the kind of cost-saving initiative that helped Euro Disney’s construction costs skyrocket. Yikes. But why worry? It’s Disney! Of course it’s gonna make money! As the chairman of the Euro Disney company told the New York Times during construction, “We are spending 22 billion French francs before we open the door, while the other places spent 700 million. This means we can pay infinitely more attention to details. There’s just too great a response to Disney for us to fail.” Dun dun dun.
 
But if he’d been paying a bit more attention, the chairman might have noticed that the French weren’t universally excited about the park’s opening. Despite the appeal of the French delegations offer, in some ways France was the worst possible place to open a Disneyland in the early 90s – because France was leading the fight against a new enemy: “cultural imperialism”.
 
By the waning years of the Cold War, takeover took a different form from Hitler’s invading armies. Countries asserted dominance a different way, bombarding you with pop culture until you liked them. As my favorite standup comedian, Dylan Moran, tells it, “The American style is totally different. Far more insidious. This empire is run on a totally different basis…the people begin to meet. They begin to foment. And what America does, while these people are talking, is they very, very gradually build a Starbucks around them. They all become addicted to latte and they lose the will to rebel. And then they turn into Americans.”
 
That’s exactly what the French were afraid of. In 1947, France was one of 23 nations signing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, which reduced taxes on imports and made international trade easier. But France saw too much of a good thing, and proposed a revision of the GATT which would allow countries to put limits on the kinds of cultural imports they could allow, giving preference to their own cultural products. If you’ve ever listened to Canadian radio, you’ve seen this discourse in action. Meanwhile, if they couldn’t legally keep Disney out, French intellectuals could at least keep Disney uncool.
 
The novelist Jean-Marie Rouart warned that “if we do not resist it, the kingdom of profit will create a world that will have all the appearance of civilization and all the savage reality of barbarism.” One member of the Academy Française called upon the French to reject “this horror of cardboard, plastic, atrocious colors, solidified chewing gum constructions and idiotic folks tories that come straight out of cartoon books for obese Americans. It is going to wipe out millions of children…mutilate their imaginations.” In case you worried the criticism was getting too unhinged, one theater critic called Euro Disney a “cultural Chernobyl.” When Michael Eisner arrived to celebrate Euro Disney stock entering the exchange, he was met with protestors who pelted him in ketchup.
 
But Disney figured it had the perfect defense against the intelligentsia: advertising. Disney spent more than $220 million in the months leading up to the park. They talked about Walt Disney’s year driving French ambulances during World War I. They even pointed out that ‘Disney’ was a French name, tracing the family’s origins back to d’Isigny-sur-Mer. Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffiths were on hand for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. You couldn’t turn on a television without seeing Goofy offering a hearty bienvenue. Disney was a bit like Nickelback: nobody cool would admit to liking them, but someone was out there buying all their stuff. By 1992, European sales accounted for 25% of all Disney licensing deals. Europe couldn’t get enough of Mickey and his friends, especially Donald Duck. The French were particularly obsessed with Donald Duck. I don’t know why, but I admit the shirt with no pants feels extremely Gallic to me. Even the Roman Catholic Church got into the spirit, assigning a priest to the Chessy region for the first time in decades. With talk of a new European Union starting to get louder, Europe was on the verge of becoming one giant, unified consumer market ready for the taking. Whatever the critics might say, the polls showed 85% of French households welcomed the new park. In February 1992, Beauty and the Beast became the first animated movie nominated for Best Picture, and a month later it took home two trophies for Best Score and Best Song. Tokyo Disneyland celebrated its 100 millionth visitor. The time was right. The park was ready. When the New York Times profiled the park just before it opened, it wrote “No one at the company is even having second thoughts. Disney being Disney, executives instead are worried that Euro Disneyland – covering an area one-fifth the size of Paris itself – just might not be big enough to handle the crowds. In a move that would border on hubris at almost any other company, plans are already being draw for emergency radio and subway announcements to warn people away when the park fills up. “My biggest fear,” Robert Fitzpatrick, Euro Disney’s chairman said, “is that we will be too successful.”
 
Well, I have good news for you, Bob.
 
April 12, 1992. Opening day. Admission was $40 for adults and $27 for children under 11, and the box office was ready. The balloons were inflated, the streets were clean, the gift shops were full, and the rollercoasters were ready to roll. There was only one thing missing:
 
Guests.
 
On a day expected to see 60,000 visitors pass through the gates, Euro Disney’s opening day had only 25,000 guests. The parking lot never filled more than halfway, and it wasn’t because they were all coming in on the train. In typical French fashion, a transport strike closed the local line, meaning visitors were no longer a 45 minute ride from the park. The radio was full of those hubristic warnings that Euro Disney would be packed, so sure enough, locals stayed home. So did tourists. So did public figures. Even the Culture Minister, who was a leader of the fight against cultural imperialism, said he was “too busy to attend today’s opening.” One critic, recalling the 1968 riots, wrote “I hope with all my heart for a May 1992 that will set fire to Euro Disneyland” – and he nearly got his wish. That night, two small bombs exploded, damaging the electricity pylons leading to the park. Scrambling behind the scenes, Disney only barely managed to keep the lights on. After that disastrous first day, the next day was worse, and the next after that. The new park was a disaster. 
 
French backlash kept coming. In June, angry about American trade policies, French farmers rode their tractors right through the streets of the former beet field, blocking the entrance to the park. “Euro Disneyland is the symbol of an American culture that has invaded our culture,” said one of the farmers. “Now the Americans want to do the same thing to our agriculture.” Local police shrugged their shoulders. By the end of its first year, Euro Disney was operating at a 300 million franc loss. It didn’t take long to realize where the grave error had occurred: while the Disney team was busy trying to see whether they could Frenchify Disneyland, they hadn’t spent any time figuring out whether they could Disneyfy the French.
 
The problems began inside the park. Disney offered thousands of French men and women good, full-time jobs, paying well above minimum wage. But the paychecks weren’t enough for employees to swallow the outrageous restrictions Disney made them abide by – restrictions like “no mustaches” and “please wear appropriate undergarments.” Disney’s cast members were told to keep their fingernails short, wear minimal makeup, and please don’t smoke in public. It was too much! Labor unions fought back, urging Disney to loosen its grooming requirements, but Disney refused. At least 500 cast members quit and another 500 were fired in the first nine weeks. French cast members resented being told to smile all the time, maintain a friendly attitude and answer questions all day. “The customer is always right” got lost in translation somewhere over the Atlantic. As one journalist observed that opening week, “There are several styles of service in Europe, unbridled enthusiasm is not a marked feature of them.” But lackluster customer service was nothing compared to the outrage that guests faced at lunchtime: Euro Disney had no wine!
 
Walt Disney always maintained a hard line stance against alcohol at his parks. French executives tried to convince Michael Eisner that this wasn’t feasible, that in Europe, things were different. If you were going to adapt Disneyland to European norms, that meant alcohol at lunch. But the CEO found it hard to believe alcohol and family entertainment could mix. One executive had an idea, and took Eisner to Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, one of the oldest theme parks in Europe. The two men enjoyed a lovely meal at one of the park’s restaurants, watching families enjoy wine with their meals in a wholesome environment. Eisner was starting to come around to the idea. Maybe this was just a cultural difference between Americans and Europeans, part of adapting to the new environment, like adding rain roofs and fireplaces. As the two men paid their bill and stepped outside to discuss the possibility, a drunk man stumbled up to them. Without missing a beat, the man vomited all over the shoes of the Disney CEO. Eisner stared down at his feet, then turned to his companion. “We are not having alcohol in the park.”
 
The lack of wine wasn’t the only lunchtime frustration. Americans eat around the clock, happy to grab lunch anytime in the afternoon, or walk around with a corn dog in their hand. The French, as we learned in last month’s episode on madeleines, abide by a very traditional and universal eating schedule. Euro Disney’s restaurants were prepared for a steady stream of customers throughout the day, but found themselves absolutely slammed at 12:30. Wait until 2 PM and try again? This is France! We eat at 12:30! 
 
Euro Disney didn’t take into account French vacation habits at all. Disney execs saw “five weeks” and got dollar signs in their eyes, without learning more about how the French used those days. While Americans routinely plan weeklong vacations at Disneyland and Disney World, the French considered Euro Disney more of a day trip. And to Disney’s horror, so did everybody else. After all, if you go to Orlando, the odds are that you’re going because of Disney World. And you may well consider staying in a Disney hotel while you’re there to keep the magic going. But are you really going to fly to Paris to spend a week in Disneyland, instead of visiting, you know, Paris? Are you going to stay in a hotel built on a former beet root, or are you going to stay a twenty minute train ride away on the Rue Royale? Euro Disney’s hotels were only half full, and as a cold winter approached, Disney slashed prices even further. As it turns out, French families might have five weeks of vacation, but all French families take those vacations at the same time. You’d think a term like “les vacances” would have tipped off Disney execs – the French don’t pull their kids out of school for vacation, they take trips in August like everybody else in Europe. During the school year, the park was a ghost town.
 
Finally, there was one more cultural difference to consider: was it possible that the French people just don’t like theme parks? No fewer than three theme parks costing over $150 million dollars each had opened in France in the three years leading up to Euro Disney. By that fateful April morning, two of them had already been forced into bankruptcy.
 
But they weren’t the only one. There was a grande éléphante in the room that nobody wanted to talk about: Europe was entering a massive recession. Whereas Tokyo Disneyland opened during a wave of postwar economic prosperity, ten years later the end of the Cold War, a huge spike in oil prices and a hangover from all that 1980s prosperity meant France was suffering economic conditions unseen in a generation. In 1992, French unemployment surpassed 10% for the first time since World War II. The shareholders got the bad news in the first quarter, and the worse news every quarter after that.
 
By 1994, the Disney shareholder meeting was a gloomy affair. Euro Disney was hemmorhaging money – it lost 1 billion dollars in its first 18 months. Disney sold 10% of their stake in Euro Disney to a Saudi prince and hinted that they might abandon the whole damn thing altogether if things didn’t turn around. What else could they do? Michael Eisner, the man who’d pinned his hopes on European expansion, told reporters only a few years later that “Anything is possible today, including closure.” Everyone gulped, crossed their fingers, and hoped for some kind of economic miracle.
 
As it turned out, the next year, two economic miracles did arrive, in the form of two jaw-dropping forms of ultra-futuristic transportation: Space Mountain and the TGV. Space Mountain was as close to a sure thing as Disney had: when everything else is failing and cultural differences seem too big to overcome, just say “screw it” and stick everybody on a really fast roller coaster that goes upside down. Disney took pains to French-ify their classic attraction, which is steampunk and based on the works of Jules Verne. At $90 million dollars, it was the most expensive roller coaster ever built at the time. Everybody – even the French – wanted to ride on the big zoomy roller space coaster. And now it was easier than ever to do it. There was only one construction project in Europe bigger than Euro Disney in the 1990s: the Chunnel. The enormous tunnel burrowing between London and Paris finally opened in 1994, just in time for France’s high speed rail to extend all the way up to the park’s gates. Rather than solve their cultural differences with the French, Disney could now tunnel underneath them: Disney-loving Brits could hop a train in London and arrive at Euro Disney two hours and forty five minutes later. Together, these two changes produced something Euro Disney had never seen before: a profit.
 
Things were looking up, but there was one more glaring opportunity: “Euro Disney” needed a new name. Once again, Disney relied too much on American research when figuring out European sentiment. To Americans in the early 90s, “Euro” meant something luxurious or exotic. To Europeans, the word “Euro” meant something to do with business, or finance, or bureaucracy. There’s a reason the currency which would arrive a few years later would be named “the euro.” Hmm, finance, business, international mergers and acquisitions – those are definitely the images that I want to think about when I’m on vacation, don’t you? Instead, a bunch of Disney’s best and brightest put their heads together to come up with something that would sound glamorous, exciting, romantic and elegant. “Uhhh, what about Disneyland Paris?” 
 
For the rest of the decade, fallout from Euro Disney’s disastrous opening could be felt across the entire theme park empire. Back in California, Michael Eisner already knew how he’d follow up on the success of his European expansion: a West Coast version of EPCOT, sitting right next to Disneyland. But EPCOT had cost nearly one billion dollars – in 1970s money – and there was no budget for that kind of project anymore. WestCOT was ambitious and experimental. If a slam-dunk like Euro Disney could fail, it was no time to try something weird. So Disney took a look at the land they’d set aside for WestCOT and said, welp, we’ll try something a bit more traditional. 
 
So, in 2001, California Adventures opened up. Once again, Disney executives whispered to the local papers that they were expecting a packed house, and once again the papers scared away the locals from attending. You’d think they’d have learned that lesson! California Adventures was another flop, in part because everything felt…cheap. The rides sucked, and it seemed like everything was just a desperate cash grab. Because it was! California Adventures was a low budget attempt to recoup something from the wreckage of Euro Disney, and it would take a billion dollar overhaul in 2007 before California Adventures finally became a smash hit.
 
Meanwhile, back in Chessy, Disneyland Paris kept limping along. French resentment limped along with it. Just as things were looking up, the 2008 economic crisis rolled through Europe, and nobody was interested in spending money at the theme parks. 2009 was one of the worst year’s in the park’s history, losing almost 100 million dollars. In 2014, Disney saw the perfect opportunity: the smash hit Ratatouille was set in Paris! Let’s make a ride out of it! The ride was a hit, but it wasn’t enough. That year, Disney spent 1 billion dollars refinancing the park. The next year, terrorist attacks in Paris, Nice and elsewhere scared tourists away, and Euro Disney saw a 10% drop in attendance. In 2017, Disney celebrated the park’s 25th anniversary by announcing a buyout of all the other owners. They were taking control of this weird, public-private monster and fixing the thing once and for all. The next year, now that Disney held 99% of the reins again, they announced they’d be doubling down again on their most troublesome child: 2 billion euros to build 3 more ares of the park and a bunch more rides. If you’re thinking “all of these sentences are blending together, that feels like a lot of money to throw at a theme park” you’re not wrong. Disneyland Paris recorded losses in 18 of its first 25 years. But the buyout seemed like a new opportunity. In 2019, Disneyland Paris had its first profitable year in a decade. But then…
 
Well, we all know what happened then. Welcome to 2020, the year of nightmares. But something weird has happened. Disneyland Paris, that unlucky, unloved experiment, so close to failure, constantly threatened with closure, survived. It survived empty parking lots, railway strikes, tractor blockades, angry intellectuals, economic recession, and French customer service. Now, it is surviving a global pandemic. Following the closure of all Disney parks in March in response to COVID-19, Disneyland Paris reopened to the public on July 15th. At this moment in time, improbable as it may seem, Disneyland Paris is more profitable than Disneyland itself. Unsurprisingly, attendance is low, and there are talks that the park may shut down again in a few weeks. But low attendance? Economic disappointment? If there’s one theme park in the Disney empire prepared to handle it, it’s Disneyland Paris. For now? C’est dans le boite!
 
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire! I’ll be sending out my newsletter to paid subscribers this week with a bit more about the French relationship with Disney. In the meantime, can I suggest a rewatch of Ratatouille? Maybe make a batch of your own, it’s peak season for all the ingredients. Whatever you decide, be sure to say hi on the show’s Facebook page. Until next time, au revoir!

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