Disney is now an IP holding company and Tomorrowland doesn't fit. Everything else inside the castle-parks is based on a genre of fiction with exception of Tomorrowland which is supposed to be, largely, non-fiction (at least have a basis in fact). I think the idea of "Discoveryland" or, even better, "Sci-filand" would be much more appropriate. Put in Atlantis, Treasure Planet, Jules-Verne themed attractions. I think that would work.
Would it work? Yes, but the real issue is whether or not today's Disney ever do it.
Disney owns more intellectual property now than it ever has before and it hardly seems to know what to do with it. The issue isn't even whether they own the IP - there are probably 100 properties they own at this point that could be cherry picked to make for any number of spectacular Tomorrowlands. But how many of them have the heightened contemporary mainstream appeal that Disney considers essential before it even considers building an attraction? THAT number is much smaller.
Atlantis, Treasure Planet, Jules Verne are all great jumping-off points for potential Disney attractions - some have even been given the chance and proven their mettle. If only any of that mattered to the company that exists today. There's no need to ditch Tomorrowland in favor of those concepts simply because those concepts don't interest Disney either. I'll eat my hat if we ever see Bob Chapek or his successor greenlight another Jules Verne themed attraction without mega-movie tie-in, and I'd be so happy to do it I'd eat it without salt.
Even TRON is a case study in this - we basically lucked into it because they didn't believe they had a more-relevant property to build in Shanghai, and Space Mountain never fully registered with guests in Hong Kong for a number of reasons, so the need was felt to try something different. Guests have famously had a habit of taking a picture in front of Space Mountain at HKDL and then moving along without going inside because it doesn't telegraph clearly as an attraction, let alone what kind it is. Hence why TRON is similar but features an outdoor portion - it says immediately to the guests that something waits inside and what it is. That they could tack onto it a movie that played recently-ish in China was seen as a bonus rather than an essential ingredient - hence why the attraction fails to fully live up to the coolness of the concept of a TRON Lightcycle roller coaster. It's not that corporate was dying to build a TRON ride. It quickly became the 2nd most popular attraction in the park and became logical to import to MK on
that basis, rather than the success of TRON as a film property. Had it not gotten past the gatekeeper in Shanghai I can't imagine we'd have actually ended up with TRON in the Magic Kingdom.
Ratatouille is similar in that sense was made of building it in DLP, and once that was done it became easier to make sense of building another one elsewhere. But there's a reason you never really heard of them considering a Ratatouille ride for the US when the Ratatouille movie actually came out - because it wasn't a so big a hit here for it to make sense on those terms alone. Despite it being one of Pixar's finest turns.
Now, that said, both TRON and Rataouille, I believe, will prove to be great examples of why Disney needs to get its act together and focus less on IP integration and more on quality attractions - I can't imagine either of these attractions not doing well by the parks they're built in once they open, but given that both those films were sort of middling successes at the box office here in the US, it's not like the success of the rides can be traced back to that. My impression of both these attractions is that they don't actually completely come together as experiences, but I suspect most guests will seriously enjoy them the way guests do overseas. So if they were to build quality experiences based on any of their properties that may not have hit big stateside but fit the Tomorrowland theme, isn't it likely that those would do just as well as the above?
At which point there's no need to change theme. They've just got to choose to adhere to it. Never in the company's history has it had so many properties under its umbrella that could suit a Tomorrowland, they've just got to get over the idea that only the uber-blockbusters are worth translating into experiences. Especially because we've seen that even that play doesn't guarantee success.
