Avengers Campus at Disneyland Paris: backstory and making of

In the official story Disney came up with, Avengers Campus is a place with a past. Tony Stark is behind it: he took over a former industrial site and converted it into the Campus, an open innovation hub where the Avengers find, train and recruit the new generation of heroes.

What makes this story interesting for a first-time visitor is its simple logic: the heroes never have enough hands. Rather than acting alone, they open their doors and rely on recruits. And throughout the land’s theming, that recruit is you. You’re not just a passing spectator: the story gives you a role.

You can love this story without ever doing a single ride. That’s actually the whole point: the land reads like a lived-in set, with its buildings, its characters and its little hidden stories.

Before talking about the heroes, let me talk about the building. The first thing the land tells you is a red-brick facade with the look of an old-time factory. The idea behind the theming is crystal clear: an old Stark industrial site, converted without being erased. The old walls stay and cutting-edge technology is grafted onto them.

That contrast carries the whole land: the vintage workshop on one side, the futuristic lab on the other. So the setting tells a story before you’ve even boarded a ride.

According to the land’s detailed theming, the site has quite a history: a former factory owned by Howard Stark (Tony’s father), converted by his son, and even traces of the Strategic Scientific Reserve, the organisation Peggy Carter belonged to. These older layers of history aren’t presented as the main storyline during your visit. Think of them as details that fans love to decode.

This approach carries on into the land’s restaurants. Stark Factory, a quick-service restaurant serving Italian dishes, is set in one of Tony Stark’s factories: the same converted-factory story, but at the table. A little further on, PYM Kitchen takes a different angle, a buffet restaurant whose dishes play with changes in scale, in a nod to Pym Technologies and the world of Ant-Man and the Wasp. For the practical side (menus, booking), I’ll point you to their own pages.

Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, is the guiding figure of the land. He’s the one who turned the site into the Campus and made it a recruitment centre.

The centrepiece of the story is the Worldwide Engineering Brigade, shortened to W.E.B. Disney presents it as a workshop bringing together the best young engineers in the world, gathered by Tony Stark to create technology and give ordinary people the means to become heroes. It’s less a club of veterans than a programme for the next generation. Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, is one of them.

Officially, you’re not there by chance: you’ve been invited to a W.E.B. open day (an Open House). This setting, the invitation, is the starting point for the whole adventure in the land.

The land also brings this next-generation idea to life for real. At the Hero Training Center, you can meet Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain Marvel and others in person, and some of them wander around the land during the day. For the programme and times, check the character meet pages.

Here’s the story, told simply. During the W.E.B. open day, Peter Parker shows off his latest invention: the Spider-Bots, small spider robots. A glitch occurs, and the Spider-Bots start multiplying out of control all over the Campus.

Spider-Man comes to the rescue. But instead of calling the Avengers, he makes a choice that sums up the spirit of the land: he counts on the recruits who are there, in other words you, to help him catch the robots before they wreck the Campus. That’s where the web-slinging move on board the W.E.B. Slinger vehicle comes from.

For all the practical side (queue, how the ride works, minimum age), have a look at the dedicated page: Spider-Man W.E.B. Adventure.

A complete change of scale. Here, you leave the ground of the Campus for space. Iron Man, helped by his artificial intelligence F.R.I.D.A.Y., spots a threat from space: projectiles sent towards Earth by the alien Kree empire.

The problem is the same as for Spider-Man: not enough heroes available. So Iron Man recruits the visitors once again. You board Stark ships nicknamed the Hypersonic to help Iron Man and Captain Marvel stop the danger.

A lovely detail worth knowing: in France, Iron Man speaks with the voice of Bernard Gabay, his official French dubbing actor in the films. Captain Marvel appears thanks to new footage of Brie Larson filmed specially for the ride, and she speaks in English. For the practical side, head to the page: Avengers Assemble: Flight Force.

The two big rides tell the same idea in two different ways. The heroes never have enough hands, so they train and recruit the next generation. That’s the common thread running through the whole land.

The difference lies in the scale of the mission. With Spider-Man, you’re on a local, tech-driven mission on the ground: catching the robots on the Campus. With Flight Force, you move up to a high-intensity mission in space, alongside the biggest names. Either way, you’re not a spectator: you’re a recruit.

Now for the real story behind the fiction. Avengers Campus opened on 20 July 2022, in the park then called Walt Disney Studios Park (since renamed Disney Adventure World). Its two big rides, Spider-Man W.E.B. Adventure and Avengers Assemble: Flight Force, opened on the same day, along with the hero meet and greets and the themed restaurants.

It’s one of the biggest transformations this park has ever seen: rather than adding a ride in a free corner, Disney completely rewrote an existing area around the Marvel world. The land is designed as a Paris outpost of the franchise, with its own story and its own sets.

Here’s the story many visitors don’t know: Avengers Assemble: Flight Force isn’t a new ride. It’s a makeover of a cult attraction from the park’s early days, the Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster avec Aerosmith. This launched rollercoaster, built by Vekoma, opened in 2002 with the park itself, with a soundtrack by the band Aerosmith and a recording studio setting.

The ride closed in 2019. Rather than knock everything down, Disney kept the ride itself (the track, the launch, the inversions) and completely redressed the story and sets around the world of Iron Man.

In practice, you sit in the same type of vehicle with a very powerful launch, but the story, the pre-show and the voices have changed completely: out goes Aerosmith, in comes the space mission alongside Captain Marvel.

The theming kept evolving after the opening. In 2023, new projection effects and a starry sky were added inside to boost the feeling of flying through space, something many regulars had been waiting for.

While Flight Force reuses an existing ride, Spider-Man W.E.B. Adventure was designed from scratch. It kept the Imagineers (the designers at Walt Disney Imagineering, Disney’s creative studio) busy on a long project: several hundred people for around four years. At Disneyland Paris, the creative direction was led by Imagineer Beth Clapperton, who had already worked on the park’s Ratatouille ride.

The heart of the project is its technology. The vehicle, the W.E.B. Slinger, has a gesture recognition system: it detects the movement of your arms and wrists, which lets you "shoot" webs at the screens without any controller. That’s what makes every ride different and explains the competitive side between passengers.

A detail I really like: to theme the ride, the teams reused set pieces from an old attraction in the park, Armageddon: Les Effets Spéciaux. A very Disney way of recycling the park’s past rather than throwing everything away.

Beyond the official story, the land is packed with little details that fans love to decode. Take them for what they are: finds spotted by fans and nods slipped in by the teams, not the main storyline written by Disney.

The richest in nods is the Spider-Man queue, designed as Peter Parker’s personal workshop. Look up and search the shelves and you’ll spot loads of references (I’ve gathered a few of them below).

The land also pays tribute to Stan Lee, the creator of many Marvel heroes, with a plaque dedicated to him near one of the Campus entrances. It’s an easy detail to miss, but it says a lot about the spirit of the place.

For the Hidden Mickeys tucked away all over the parks, I have a separate guide: the Hidden Mickeys. And for the wider secrets of Disneyland Paris as a whole, head to the secrets of Disneyland Paris.

To place this story in the wider history of the park and its lands, go back to the history of Disneyland Paris. And if you enjoy what goes on behind the scenes of the rides, I explore the stories Disney imagined for other places in the same series: the legend of Thunder Mesa and the story of the Tower of Terror.