Everybody has suffered from the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic, but keeping the majority of theme parks shut or operating at limited capacity has seen Disney take an absolute financial battering.
To give you an indication of just how important that revenue stream is to the monolithic corporation, The Walt Disney Company posted a post-tax profit of $460 million last year. While that’s hardly chump change, it was down a massive 91% from the $5.4 billion profits announced just twelve months previously, and a lot of those losses are theme park-related.
However, a new report has revealed that the Mouse House are looking to parlay some of their most well-known attractions into Disney Plus exclusives, with plans said to be in place for a shared streaming universe based on the Magic Kingdom.
Veteran Star Trek producer Ron Moore, who recently signed an exclusive deal with the outfit to oversee development of the small screen mythology, will write and executive produce the first series, The Society of Explorers and Adventurers, which is set in a world where the various theme park lands exist in a reality just outside of our own.
Moore is already working on the platform’s Swiss Family Robinson reboot, although it’s unclear if the show will be part of the planned Magic Kingdom universe as well. There’s certainly plenty of scope to tell stories based on the sheer volume of rides and characters spread across the vast Disney theme park empire, though, and with the buckets of cash being invested into original Disney Plus content, they might even end up roping in Jungle Cruise leads Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt to give the expansion an initial boost in star power.
