This is a good question too and I'm also not sure of the answer.
I think the main problem with building "lands" is that they're really only suitable for a small number of IPs. Star Wars and Pandora work as lands -- Cars does too because it's so divorced from the real world. I don't think Toy Story really does as an IP, which is probably a big part of the problem with TSL. Most IPs aren't big enough and/or don't have enough variety to really work as a huge overall land. I don't think many people would be super interested in something like a Snow White land with two or three rides, shops, and a restaurant all themed to Snow White. And as you mentioned, building something like a "Pixar Land" is likely to come across as a shrug.
The original Disney-MGM was probably a good model for that, actually (and Universal Studios too, I suppose), where it wouldn't necessarily matter if you had two rides next to each other that had absolutely nothing in common because the park itself set the overall theme. That's true of DAK and EPCOT to an extent as well, but the individual overall theme of each park limits what really fits there.
This is part of the problem with coming along decades into a park's existence and picking apart its mission statement to convert it into a new thing, like they're trying with DHS and EPCOT.
Say what you will about the success or failures of the parks' individual attractions, but they both worked as holistic experiences. EPCOT was about one thing, Disney MGM Studios was about another, and the attractions bore those things out. There will always be room under the umbrella of a theme to move up (or down) in the quality of the attractions on the menu - Tower of Terror was a great add that further cemented the theme of the park, but Rock N' Roller Coaster diluted it a little - but once you start pulling at the thread of what the park actually
is as a guest experience it's very easy to unravel the whole thing. Which is how you end up with huge swaths of buildings throughout both parks that no longer seem to serve any meaningful purpose, despite being purpose-built and well used for 20 years. So then you either reskin them (cheaply, because the budget isn't there for serious placemaking) or you knock them down. But unless you have a
really good idea for what the park is looking to become you're gonna end up just as lost as you were before. Each park needs a North Star that guides all its design choices, and right now DHS and EPCOT are each sorely lacking one.
Part of the reason The Magic Kingdom works is because so much of its infrastructure was built in a time where this holistic approach was tantamount and staunchly adhered to. It's only in the past 25 years that Disney has started to waver on its core tenets of park design, and Magic Kingdom has seen comparatively little investment in that time. So in a lot of cases the worst it's seen
thematically is having only little pieces picked apart or watered down by misplaced IP or general show quality decline (I'm looking at you, Aladdin's Magic Carpets and Fountains-turned-to-Planters). The days where Animated Characters were basically contained to Fantasyland are over, but the structures that were built throughout the park before those floodgates opened mostly still stand. This does a surprising amount of good for the feel of park, whether the casual guest realises it or not. There's hardly a misplaced or boring-looking building in The Magic Kingdom, and that's because some 95 percent of them were built when there was no mistake about what The Magic Kingdom should be. And, of course, it has the classics, and all that.
EPCOT is the only other WDW park that came close to having its infrastructure benefit from such a considered design approach - and a good amount of it has been tossed out the window in the past 2 years. World Showcase is mostly untouched in this regard and is part of why it's never suffered the ills of a Future World that's spent the last 20 years in various states of upheaval. And, of course, the alcohol and foodie booths. But you walk around World Showcase and that part of the park still feels like the "real deal" of a themed design experience.
DHS . . . had a tougher time out of the gate. The park was rushed, underbuilt, and the dream of an actual working studio in Orlando fizzled sooner than they'd expected. This didn't affect the park immediately, because the concept of visiting a Disneyfied "working studio" in the middle of "Hollywood" is still an appealing one, even if it now necessitated quotation marks. And the solid attraction menu spoke well for that - the rides and shows were unified and mostly enjoyable. But once you give up on that you have to find a new idea that opens itself to the new attractions you want to add, retroactively fits the old ones under its umbrella,
and is an interesting idea to the guest on a conceptual level. And then you have to COMMIT to it. DHS is currently failing on at least 2 of those 4 points, which is a big deal.
Animal Kingdom, despite needing more attractions, probably has stayed more true to its North Star than any park in the US, which is impressive given that it's one of the newest. Great bones that still need more filling out, but what has grown in so far generally enhances that structure rather than inhibits it. I really hope it keeps on this trend as it expands. It could be the best park in the US if only it had enough to do.
Ultimately, my point is that the answer is to pick a strong
theme for your
theme park, adhere the lands to the
theme, and then let things flow from there. If Toy Story Land only seems to kinda fit the new mission of DHS, I would argue that's at least in part because the new mission of DHS is kinda half-baked. What
are they trying to do there? The real answer is "give some of Disney's most popular properties a place to roost in Florida without having to think too hard about it", but they'll never tell the guests that. It's clear they decided to add Star Wars and Toy Story prescriptively, as if that would somehow inform what the park would evolve into. But it didn't, because it doesn't work that way. So instead they're pretending it's a . . . Studio . . . in Hollywood . . . which makes movies . . . and you like
these movies . . . so they're here . . . they're not being MADE here . . . this is just . . . where they are . . . because . . . they had to go somewhere? But we all know it's because they let the park languish to the point where it wasn't pulling its own weight, and Star Wars and Toy Story are expensive bandaids that hopefully are shiny enough to make you not notice that there's no real "idea" to the park anymore. That great Hollywood Boulevard entrance has no real relationship to the part of the park they want you most to love, but they didn't have a better idea, so there it stays. The better for us, who recognize how solid the entry is and would hate to lose it, but it speaks to that lack of focus.
Perhaps nothing demonstrates this more clearly than that list of new names they were testing for DHS that ended up with them simply sticking with what they had - because it was obvious they had no actual new
idea for what the park was becoming, other than "the place where Star Wars Land was being built". Which will probably be enough, for now, but I wonder what happens when guests start to look around the rest of it and say "but what even
is this place?" It's the Miscellaneous park, sir, and you can't bring that Lightsaber on Slinky Dog.
