The Avengers Campus story at Disneyland Paris: behind the scenes

Disney gave Avengers Campus an official backstory, and the place has a history. It all starts with Tony Stark, who acquired an old industrial complex and reinvented it as the Campus: an open hub for innovation where the Avengers find, train, and sign up tomorrow’s heroes.

For first-time visitors, the appeal lies in how easy the logic is to grasp: there are never enough heroes to go around. So rather than working solo, they throw the doors open and lean on new recruits. Everywhere in the land’s theming, you are that recruit. You aren’t someone just wandering through, since the story hands you a part to play.

No need to ride anything to enjoy this story. In fact, that’s the beauty of it: the land works like a setting people seem to live in, full of buildings, characters, and small tucked-away stories.

The heroes can wait, because the building comes first. What greets you as you walk in is red brickwork that looks like a factory from another era. The theming makes its point clearly: this was once a Stark industrial site, and it was repurposed rather than wiped away. The original walls are still standing, with high-tech gear bolted on.

That contrast drives the entire land: the vintage workshop on one side, the futuristic lab on the other. So the setting tells a story before you even get on a ride.

Dig into the fuller theming and the site turns out to have quite a history. It was once a plant owned by Howard Stark (Tony’s father) before his son repurposed it, and there are even signs of the Strategic Scientific Reserve, Peggy Carter’s organization. Your visit doesn’t spotlight these older layers as the main plot. Treat them as clues for dedicated fans who enjoy piecing things together.

This approach carries all the way into the land’s restaurants. Stark Factory, a quick-service spot serving Italian food, sits in the setting of a Tony Stark factory: the same converted-factory story, but at the table. A little farther on, PYM Kitchen takes a different angle, a buffet restaurant whose dishes play with changes in scale, as a nod to Pym Technologies and the world of Ant-Man and the Wasp. For practical details (menus, reservations), check their restaurant pages.

Everything here traces back to Iron Man himself, Tony Stark. He converted the old site into the Campus and set it up as a place to bring in recruits.

The key piece of the story is the Worldwide Engineering Brigade, or W.E.B. for short. Disney presents it as a workshop where Tony Stark has gathered the world’s best young engineers to invent new technology and give ordinary people what they need to become heroes. Think of it less as a club for veterans and more as a program for the next wave, focused on the new generation. Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, is part of it.

Officially, your visit is no accident: you’ve been invited to the W.E.B. Open House, the day it opens its doors to the public. That invitation is what sets the whole adventure in the land in motion.

The land makes this next-generation role real, too. At the Hero Training Center, where the heroes train, you can meet Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain Marvel, and others in person, and some of them walk around the land during the day. For schedules and times, see the character meet pages.

In a nutshell, here’s how it goes. At the W.E.B. open house, Peter Parker unveils his newest creation, the Spider-Bots, which are small robotic spiders. Something glitches, and the Spider-Bots begin copying themselves uncontrollably across the Campus.

Spider-Man swings in to help. Rather than call in the Avengers, though, he does something that captures what the land is all about: he turns to the recruits who happen to be there (that’s you) to round up the robots before they tear the Campus apart. This is why you sling webs from your W.E.B. Slinger vehicle.

Practical details such as the line, how the ride operates, and the minimum age are all on its own page: Spider-Man W.E.B. Adventure.

Now the scale changes completely, as you leave the Campus behind and head into space. With help from F.R.I.D.A.Y., his AI, Iron Man picks up an incoming danger: the alien Kree empire is firing projectiles at Earth.

Just as with Spider-Man, the heroes are short-staffed. That means Iron Man turns to guests for help yet again. You climb aboard Stark spacecraft called the Hypersonic and team up with Iron Man and Captain Marvel to fend off the attack.

Here’s a tasty bit of trivia: in France, Iron Man is voiced by Bernard Gabay, the actor who dubs him in the French versions of the movies. Captain Marvel shows up in brand-new footage that Brie Larson filmed just for this ride, and she talks in English. The practical side lives on the ride page: Avengers Assemble: Flight Force.

The two big rides share one idea, told in two ways. Since there are never enough heroes, the Avengers train new talent and sign them up. That idea runs through the entire land.

What changes is how big the mission is. Spider-Man sends you on a hands-on, high-tech job close to home: rounding up robots around the Campus. Flight Force launches you into an intense mission in space next to the top heroes. In both cases, you don’t just watch, because you’ve been recruited.

Time to leave the fiction and look at what really happened. Avengers Campus welcomed its first guests on July 20, 2022, in what was still called Walt Disney Studios Park back then (it has since become Disney Adventure World). Both headline rides, Spider-Man W.E.B. Adventure and Avengers Assemble: Flight Force, debuted that same day, together with the hero meet-and-greets and the themed restaurants.

Few projects in this park’s history have been this ambitious. Disney didn’t just slot a ride into an empty corner. It reworked an entire existing area from top to bottom around the Marvel world. The result is meant as the franchise’s Paris outpost, with a story and sets all its own.

Here’s a bit of trivia many guests don’t know: Avengers Assemble: Flight Force isn’t a brand-new ride. It’s a makeover of a cult favorite from the park’s early days, Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster avec Aerosmith. This launched roller coaster, built by Vekoma, opened in 2002 along with the park itself, set to a soundtrack by the band Aerosmith inside a recording studio setting.

Its last riders came through in 2019. Disney chose not to bulldoze it: the coaster itself stayed (track, launch, and inversions), while the storyline and scenery were rebuilt from scratch around Iron Man’s world.

In practice, you sit in the same kind of hard-launched vehicle, but the story, the preshow, and the voices are completely different: goodbye Aerosmith, hello space mission alongside Captain Marvel.

Changes didn’t stop once the land opened. Disney added fresh projection effects and a star-filled sky inside the building in 2023, giving a stronger sense of soaring through space, an upgrade lots of regulars had hoped for.

Flight Force recycles an older ride, but Spider-Man W.E.B. Adventure was built from the ground up. It was a big undertaking for the Imagineers (Walt Disney Imagineering’s designers, Disney’s creative studio): roughly four years of work and several hundred people. At Disneyland Paris, Imagineer Beth Clapperton led the creative side, after working on the park’s Ratatouille ride.

Technology sits at the center of it all. The W.E.B. Slinger vehicle uses gesture recognition, reading how you move your arms and wrists so you can "throw" webs at the screens with no controller in hand. Because of that, every ride plays out differently, and riders get pretty competitive with each other.

One touch I’m fond of: to decorate the ride, the teams salvaged scenery from an attraction the park used to have, Armageddon: Les Effets Spéciaux. It’s a classic Disney move, reusing the park’s history rather than tossing it out.

The official storyline is only part of it. The land is full of small touches that hardcore fans enjoy decoding. Take them as what they are: discoveries made by fans and winks hidden by the creative teams, not the core plot written by Disney.

Nowhere has more of them than the Spider-Man line, styled as Peter Parker’s own workshop. Glance up at the ceiling and dig through the shelves to uncover loads of references (I’ve rounded up a few below).

There’s also a tribute to Stan Lee, who created so many Marvel heroes: a plaque in his honor sits close to one of the Campus entrances. You could easily walk right past it, yet it captures the spirit of the place perfectly.

For the Hidden Mickeys tucked away all over the parks, I’ve written a separate guide: the Hidden Mickeys. And for secrets from across Disneyland Paris, head to the secrets of Disneyland Paris.

To place this story within the bigger history of the park and its lands, you can go back to the history of Disneyland Paris. And if the stories behind the rides are your thing, I explore the tales Disney created for other places in the same series: the legend of Thunder Mesa and the story of the Tower of Terror.