Disneyland and Walt Disney World are currently blowing people away with the new Star Wars attraction Rise of the Resistance. But Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge was last year. Disney Parks never seem to rest and 2020 has its own major new addition when Avengers Campus comes to Disney California Adventure at the Disneyland Resort. As part of the new land, we'll be getting a Spider-Man themed attraction, and we just got our first look at how Spider-Man will fit into the new land. Not an on-screen digital creation, but as a fully functional animatronic who flies through the air.
Spider-Man is not shown in any context, we don't get to see anything about the new attraction architecture or land surrounding him, but we do get to see Spider-Man flipping and flying through the air, and the fact that we are in fact looking at a fully mechanical wall-crawler makes the whole thing that much more impressive. Check it out.
The video description actually claims this animatronic will fly above the Avengers Campus, so this might not actually simply be part of the new Spider-Man attraction, but could be a figure that we could see swinging between buildings above the land itself, something that will make the whole land feel alive, like you really are a new recruit visiting the campus, and you happen to see Spider-Man swing by, because he's there too.
It was revealed more than a year ago that Walt Disney Imagineering was working on animatronic "stunt" performers that could pull off moves just like this. That's clearly what we're seeing here. The motions that we see Spider-Man going through here are near identical to what we have seen the animatronic frames doing previously.
The idea of seeing an actual physical Spider-Man swinging between buildings or leaping between rooftops is almost too awesome to contemplate. This sort of thing would have been actually impossible even a few years ago.
We also know we're going to be getting an animatronic Spider-Man because of a piece from the Disney+ documentary series The Imagineering Story. In that, we saw this animatronic test that wasn't specifically labeled as being for a Spider-Man character, but if you watch the way the figure moves, it pretty much has to be exactly that.
With the level of immersion present in Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge taking Disneyland to a new level, the Imagineers have their work cut out for them to make the next new addition to the resort stand out. Avengers Campus isn't nearly as big as Galaxy's Edge, so there are some limitations in that regard, but a new type of animatronic that we've never seen before will certainly help everything feel bigger and better.
Avengers Campus is set to open at Disney California Adventure this summer. The new Spider-Man attraction and a Doctor Strange show will be part of the first phase, with an E-ticket Avengers experience following sometime later as part of Phase Two.
