Multiverse setting gives Avengers Campus many options
No matter what your favorite place is at Disneyland, I will bet you that the Imagineers who designed it created a long backstory for that place that you’ve probably never heard. Imagineers and other companies’ designers need those backstories to help them create spaces that feel authentic and engaging to visitors.
Why does something look the way it does? How did all this stuff get here? Who made it? Having a backstory that answers these questions allows designers to create something that makes you believe you have stepped into another world. As the old joke goes, “The most important thing in life is authenticity, and if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
But all the hard work that designers put into creating authentic locations can be undone if they get the timing wrong. That’s why fans cannot meet Darth Vader or Obi-Wan Kenobi in Disneyland’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge land. Those characters are long gone by the time that land’s story takes place during the “Star Wars” sequel trilogy.
Timing an attraction — and especially an entire land — can be tricky. Disney’s Imagineers sacrificed the opportunity for fans to meet beloved original and prequel trilogy characters in their “Star Wars” land by setting it in the time that they did. In other cases, designers fudge the timing of when an attraction is set.
You can find Doc Hudson inside Disney California Adventure’s Radiator Springs Racers ride, but I have seen Lightning McQueen in his “Cars 2” livery elsewhere in Cars Land, which confuses the land’s time setting, since Doc Hudson is no longer around when “Cars 2” takes place. At The Wizarding World of Harry Potter — Diagon Alley at Universal Studios Florida, the land’s Gringotts ride takes place during a specific moment from “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” when Diagon Alley is supposed to be in disrepair. Yet the land around the ride appears in its “normal” condition.
Which brings me to Avengers Campus and the opportunity that Marvel is giving Disney to break the rules about what characters and events can appear in a meticulously themed land. (Spoiler warning if you have not finished watching “Loki” on Disney+.)
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has opened a multiverse — where different versions of the same character can exist at the same time and place. By casting Avengers Campus as a nexus location in the MCU’s multiverse, Disney can eat its cake and have it too with character appearances. Want to see Sam Wilson’s Captain America along with Steve Rogers’? No problem. In a multiverse nexus location, the appearance of incongruous characters or events does not undercut authenticity. Heck, it even adds to it.
Disney can get away with this in Avengers Campus because Marvel has done the hard work of setting up a well-explained multiverse in the MCU. “Star Wars” hasn’t done that, so Disney would have some work to do to put Darth Vader in Galaxy’s Edge. But designers who can lean on a well-established multiverse have a powerful tool to use in making theme park fans’ wildest dreams not just come true, but to feel true, too.
Robert Niles covers theme parks worldwide as the editor of ThemeParkInsider.com.