The 1992 Euro Disney plan: what was planned and what never happened

On 12 April 1992, the resort opened as Euro Disney Resort. What opened that day wasn’t a finished project: it was the first phase of a much bigger plan, signed five years earlier and modelled on Walt Disney World in Florida. It was the second Disneyland-style park built outside the US, after Tokyo (opened in 1983) and the first in Europe.

The idea was to build a destination for several days, with several parks, its own hotels, lakes and leisure facilities, on a gigantic site in Marne-la-Vallée.

When I walk along the lake today between the Disneyland Hotel and the New York, or pass the large plots still empty away from the parks, I can see the traces of that original plan: a project designed on a very large scale, of which only part was built when it was meant to be.

The plan was for a complete destination, designed to grow in phases: a first theme park, seven hotels linked by a network of lakes, a leisure complex, a golf course and large reserves of land for future parks and hotels.

The search for a European site began back in the 1970s. It took around ten years of studies for France to win, after a competition with Spain in particular, before the choice settled on Marne-la-Vallée.

The development agreement between Disney and the French authorities was signed on 24 March 1987. It bore the signatures of Jacques Chirac, then Prime Minister, and Michael Eisner, chairman of the Walt Disney Company, and covered the development of Sector IV of Marne-la-Vallée. It set aside a site of around 2,000 hectares some thirty kilometres east of Paris. The masterplan, drawn up by American urban planning firms, was directly inspired by Walt Disney World: the aim wasn’t to build a stand-alone park, but to create a destination that could keep visitors for several days, sheltered from the outside world.

On the financial side, the overall budget for the project was announced at around 4 billion dollars. The agreement also committed the public authorities to transport links: extending RER line A (the Paris suburban train) to the park gates and building a TGV (high-speed train) station, backed up by tax incentives and subsidies.

From the start, the plan mentioned two theme parks, and the land was divided up to take more in the long run.

At opening, the resort included a theme park (Euro Disneyland, today’s Disneyland Park), seven hotels with 5,800 rooms in total, a shopping and entertainment complex called Festival Disney, a network of lakes and a golf course. Construction began in 1988 and involved around 10,000 people, mostly skilled workers (bricklayers, carpenters, electricians).

The hotel concept is deliberate: each one represents a region of the US, from the pink Disneyland Hotel at the park entrance to the Cheyenne, styled like a Wild West town, by way of the Newport Bay on the lakeside. A council of renowned architects (Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Robert Stern, Stanley Tigerman, Robert Venturi) had been brought together as early as 1988 to give the whole resort a coherent look.

Festival Disney, the complex of restaurants and shops later renamed Disney Village, is the work of Frank Gehry, recognisable by its oxidised steel towers under a canopy of lights. The 18-hole golf course opened in summer 1992 and gained 9 extra holes the following year.

The big one missing is the second park: Disney-MGM Studios Europe, planned for 1995, was frozen as early as mid-1992. Also planned were an extension of the hotel area and land set aside for future parks, which never got beyond the drawing board.

The second park was meant to be a working film and television studio, half theme park and half real production, built around Hollywood’s golden age. Its construction budget was announced at around 2.3 billion dollars. Faced with the resort’s financial difficulties, Robert Fitzpatrick, Euro Disney’s first president, ordered work to be suspended.

The project didn’t disappear completely: it came back, but much later and heavily scaled down, as Walt Disney Studios Park (announced in 1999, opened on 16 March 2002, with only three of the nine planned rides running on opening day).

The plan went even further: the land had been designed to host more parks beyond the first two, with a ring road and vast plots left free. Beyond this ring road, land was set aside for extra hotels, timeshare residences and camping.

Other parts of the masterplan, such as a mixed-use town centre, a business park and a regional shopping centre, were moved to the south-east of the site and, years later, would become Val d’Europe.

The resort attracted far fewer visitors than expected, built up heavy losses and came close to bankruptcy, with debt of around 3 billion dollars in summer 1994.

By May 1992, attendance was around 25,000 visitors a day, far from the 60,000 hoped for. Losses mounted over the first year of operation. The debt grew, and against that backdrop all the expansion projects, starting with the second park, were put on hold. The dream of a large multi-park resort was left hanging on the financial survival of the resort that was already open.

The resort was saved by a recapitalisation in 1994, and that’s when it took the name Disneyland Paris, on 1 October 1994.

The rescue plan brought in a new investor, the Saudi prince Al-Waleed, who put in around 345 million dollars for 24% of the capital. Disney’s stake was cut from 49% to 39%, and the banks agreed to waive interest on the debt for a few years. The change of name went hand in hand with this turnaround: the aim was to turn the page on Euro Disney’s damaged image.

The idea of a multi-park resort wasn’t dropped for all that. It took until 2002 to see the second park, then decades more for the ambition of an expanding resort to really take shape again with the Disney Adventure World expansion.