It’s become apparent that in terms of their acquired intellectual properties, Disney had decided that Star Wars goes in Disneyland and Marvel goes in Disney California Adventure. And now that both have their own “land” it’s possible to compare and contrast now that we’ve had a couple of years for things to settle in.
It’s pretty clear that one of the real stars of Star Wars is the aesthetic. If you never had a single character walking around, if you didn’t ride the two rides, the Aurebesh signs and the X-Wing and A-Wing parked in the woods and the architecture and the ambient music would be an attraction all by itself. There are things to buy: blue milk, lightsabers, robes, droids. It’s an immersive space.
Avengers Campus has to some extent been ill-served both by the Covid delays and by the strike-induced lag in the MCU. But Marvel’s world is sprawling and diverse. There’s not an obvious thing like a lightsaber or an X-wing — Thor has a hammer, Cap has a shield (and wings sometimes), there’s a quinjet on top of a building, but there’s so many different things across thirty movies that it’s impossible to have a unified look or a common point of reference.
And that’s why despite only one ride, Avengers Campus has (and needs) characters. Lots of them. I have a pic of me and the wife with the Wasp holding the shrunken version of A Bug’s Land. I have a pic with America Chavez from a gray morning where no one seemed to recognize that she was an actual superhero and not just a kid at the park (the problem of not having a flashy costume). At different points on Monday I saw Spider-Man, T’Challa, Steve Rogers, Loki and Red Guardian just hanging around.
Star Wars is about creating a world. There are characters that fill that world, some amazingly compelling (Andor might well be the defining piece of Star Wars media at this point). But Marvel’s world is all about the characters, because it’s too big and sprawling for anything else. They still need a proper E-ticket ride at the park, and the real problem is the same as Rise of the Resistance: how do you commit to a single moment and put a billion dollars on it? Especially when Star Tours has a ridiculous number of possible combinations and even Smuggler’s Run is ticketed for new mission types in 2026?
And that’s another thing: Galaxy’s Edge, to me, is proof that Disney always planned for the story of the Resistance and the First Order to go past episode 9. The only way you allow Rian Johnson to deconstruct everything is if you know you’re going to carry on from that point, not immediately go to a finale that undoes half of what you did. Rey, Finn, Poe and Chewie were meant to fight the First Order for a whole new trilogy of their own once the Han/Luke/Leia triumvirate had their sendoff, but that’s not how it went down in the end. No one planned for Carrie to die, or for the Mouse to quail in the face of basement chuds reacting poorly to challenging storytelling.
But Star Wars still provides a fully immersive world, especially now that we’ve demonstrated how much more storytelling is possible there once you pry yourself away from Skywalkers. And it’s made it possible and necessary to reevaluate what we thought we know. Of which more later, certainly. But all I know is that owing to a quirk of hardware breakdown, I was able to walk the length of Black Spire Outpost on a cool gray morning with absolutely no one in sight and only the ambient sounds around, and it was worth the entire price of admission just for those few moments.