Yeah I’m over Pixar in the parks. I don’t think the movies are amazing fits for themed physical spaces because they are far more character driven than they are location driven. There’s some exceptions of course, like Radiator Springs from Cars, which is why that turned out well.
The allusion to being character driven vs location driven determines the success of single-ip lands.
Across 11 films and dozens of shows, Star Wars doesn’t really have repeated or iconic location. The most notable is the Cantina, maybe Jabba’s palace, the Jedi Temple, the Falcon, and big ships.
Galaxy’s Edge masterfully gave us a star destroyer and the Falcon, but Star Wars lacks a large environment you want to explore. The Jedi Temple or even the senate building aren’t really on a scale you can replicate.
So honestly, perhaps they should’ve built Galaxy’s Edge to be on the Wookie or Ewok planets, since they’re A) not barren environments and B) exist at replicable scale.
I digress, moral of the story, Star Wars is not a location-driven story in the slightest. It’s mainly characters and story driven.
On the flip side, properties like Cars, Harry Potter (which has movie after movie take place in the same castle), Nintendo games where your character selection doesn’t matter, but it’s how you interact with and move through the environment in their various platformers or even in Mario Kart where the only variability between matches is the chosen maps.
As people have complained, Avatar’s characters are not the most iconic or recognizable. People ask the “first name test” where you need to recite the first names of the main characters, and while Sully may be the easiest to remember, I honestly fail pretty hard.
But that’s because Avatar is entirely about the environment. It’s an environmental film. In WoW, Cameron wanted a movie that heavily occurred in the water, and that’s what he got. As such, replicating the environments, as seen in Pandora at Animal Kingdom, can capture the essence of the movie in a really impactful way.
The characters in Avatar are more a vessel to showcase the environment and a message, than individually significant. Which largely is what makes it such a great land.
To be clear, I still really enjoy SWGE, but after visiting and revisiting all the premier single-ip lands over the past year, its execution doesn’t stand-up to even the less ambitious competitors. Rise, of course, is still a masterpiece, but I think creating a fantastic ride is much less dependent on the source material than a whole land. I think you can pretty much create a great ride on any IP, but in terms of creating a whole land, the source material, or more accurately the type of source material, is extremely important.
While Avenger’s Campus isn’t really a one-ip land (it’s more dozens of broad IPs strung together, it’s more a narrow one-concept land), but likewise Marvel lacks recognizable locations across its various franchises, so it’s hard to immerse a guest within a Marvel land. That said, I would've preferred the original concept for a New York style land (as originally seen in WDSP concept art), because grounding a property that lacks an identifiable location in an identifiable location does wonders.
