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Credit: Walt Disney World/ Matt Stroshane
When I was a D23 last summer I sat in the Honda Center and watched Disney Experiences Chairman Josh D’Amaro lay out an incredibly ambitious plan for new attractions at Walt Disney World. The number of new rides and experiences planned is quite incredible and it means that when it’s all said and done Disney World is going to look quite different. And likely very impressive.
Of course, the downside of all that is that all the new attractions opening means a lot of classic attractions closing at Disney World. We’ve known for quite some time just which attractions were on the chopping block, and now we know just when many of these experiences will close, and it seems to all be happening awfully soon.
It’s Tough To Be A Bug Is The Latest Disney World Attraction To Announce Its Shut Down
It feels like Disney World fans just finished grappling with the announcement the Muppets Courtyard would be closing in June. Now the latest axe to all has landed on It’s Tough To Be A Bug, the 4D theater show at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. We already knew the show was being replaced by a show based on Zootopia, called Zootopia: Better Together, but now we know that the last day to watch the show is coming up fast. The last showings will take place on March 16, and the transformation will begin the next day.
It’s Tough to be a Bug’s closure isn’t the only one at Disney Animal Kingdom. The majority of the Dinoland U.S.A. area is already closed as work has begun to transform it into a new Tropical Americas area. Combined with the previously mentioned Muppets closure and the planned transformation of Frontierland at Magic Kingdom into a Cars area (which is likely to be announced and started soon), there are going to be a lot of construction walls at Disney World all at once. Perhaps too many.
Disney World Is Going To Be Covered In Construction Walls
The last five years at Disney World were rough if you were a fan of Epcot. The park underwent a significant overhaul that put nearly the entire front half of the park under construction. The walls came down only briefly last year before they went back up again when Test Track began a major redevelopment. When the ride reopens later this year Epcot may be the only park without construction walls in it.
When Disney first announced all these new plans, I expected them to take the better part of a decade to be completed. I expected to see one major redevelopment be completed before the next one started. Instead, it looks like we’re going into a period where a lot of Disney World is going to be closed all at once.
There is an upside to this, of course, the sooner all the work begins, the sooner it’s all done. We won’t be waiting nearly as long as I expected to for some of these new attractions, but it’s going to make the next several months, or even years, pretty painful before we get there. While I appreciate the urgency, it has the potential to make my own, and anybody else’s trips to Walt Disney World in the near future feel less than complete.
Still, slowing down the work would mean that only small pieces of the resort would be closed at any given moment. At this point, I fully expect that the work in Frontierland will start soon, and that means we could end up with entire lands at three different parks closed during the busy summer months. That’s just too much to be closed at once.
It’s Tough to be a Bug’s closure will be done in the blink of an eye by comparison. The show will close in March and the new show is expected to open before the end of the year.