Disney Ordered a Spaceship Earth TV Show, But Do We Really Need It?!

Disney+ has ordered a pilot for a Spaceship Earth television series inspired by the iconic EPCOT attraction at Walt Disney World. This post covers the flagship streaming service’s adaptation of another classic ride, the latest in a line of movies or shows based on parks IP. Plus, our commentary about whether this project is really necessary, if it’ll actually happen in the first place, and what it could mean for the ride reimagining if it does.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, IT: Welcome to Derry co-showrunner Jason Fuchs and Michael Waldron are writing the pilot. Fuchs will serve as showrunner; he executive produces via his FiveTen Productions, which he and his wife, producer and actress Alexandra Fuchs, recently launched.

Also executive producing are Waldron, director Lee Toland Krieger (You, Riverdale), Adam Fishbach (Love, Victor) and Waldron’s Anomaly Pictures partner Adam Fasullo. Fuchs and Fishbach previously worked together on the 2024 feature Argylle (a massive bomb despite a great cast, fun and silly premise), which Fuchs wrote and produced and Fishbach exec produced.

The Spaceship Earth pilot will use the attraction’s premise of traveling through time to track humankind’s progress as a jumping-off point. The logline for the pilot states:

“When a mission to avert an imminent global cataclysm goes awry, a small band of teenagers from Earth’s past and future must join forces to confront a threat as vast and mysterious as time itself.”

Casting for the Spaceship Earth pilot is now underway.

Should it go to series, Spaceship Earth will be the latest Disney project based on one of its theme park attractions.

The most notable of those are obviously the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise; as a quick aside, my biggest and boldest 2026 D23 Expo prediction is that Disney brings Johnny Depp on stage at the Disney Entertainment Showcase to announce a Pirates of the Caribbean reboot/sequel.

Others include two Haunted Mansion movies, as well as Jungle Cruise and Tomorrowland. This Spaceship Earth series sounds a tad like Tomorrowland to me. If Spaceship Earth does not go to series, it’ll enter the graveyard of abandoned parks adaptations, which is far larger than the number of successfully completed projects.

Fuchs also has some experience in the theme park-adaptation realm: He wrote a pilot for ABC in 2013 titled Big Thunder, based on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride. Beyond Spaceship Earth, he’s also writing a live-action feature adaptation of My Hero Academia for Netflix and Legendary and the next Transformers film at Paramount.

Michael Waldron is more of a known quantity among Disney fans, primarily for his work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He developed the Disney+ series Loki, where he established the core rules of branching timelines and introduced the TVA. From there, he wrote the feature film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, cementing his position as Marvel’s multiversal storyteller and earning him the lead writing duties for the marquee tentpoles Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.

Beyond the MCU, Waldron’s influence spans Disney’s broader television and streaming ecosystem through an overall deal with 20th Television under his aforementioned banner, Anomaly Pictures. He co-created, wrote, and executive produced the Hulu comedy series Chad Powers alongside Glen Powell. That’s one of my favorite guilty pleasure TV shows, and although Sarah will fiercely deny it, she also loves Chad Powers. But I digress.

Our Commentary

I’m a little reluctant to overanalyze this Spaceship Earth series. There have been several theme parks IP adaptations announced or rumored over the last several years, and many of those are still in development purgatory or have been cancelled completely.

There are (or were?) projects in the pipeline based on the Society of Explorers and Adventurers, Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (okay, technically that’s a remake–but still), Seth Rogen’s take on Figment, the Club 33 murder mystery movie (the best idea of the bunch, if you ask me), and others I’m probably forgetting.

At one point, Disney+ even looked to launch a franchise centered around the Disney Park’s and dubbed it the “Magic Kingdom Universe.” Guess they were hoping lightning would strike twice and it could be something akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Anyway, I’ve stopped anxiously awaiting updates about most of these because it’s likely most will never see the light of day.

That’s understandable. Actually, it’s not just understandable. It is fantastic news for us, as parks fans.

As leadership has conceded on several occasions, the company overspent on its Disney+ streaming service to create a deluge of content, and quality suffered as a result. While I don’t necessarily want less content, I do want higher quality shows and movies.

If that means less, so be it. I assume at least some of those previously-announced projects will be victims of the cutbacks and renewed emphasis on quality. Hard to imagine every film or series script based on a couple-minute-long roller coaster would be a winner.

Meanwhile, the cutback is fantastic news because the free spending on streaming was coming at the expense of investing in theme parks. Wall Street got fixated on the shiny new object, demanded growth at all costs on streaming, and Disney obliged for a couple of years during the “peak” of the Chapek era.

That didn’t start to change until 2022, at which point Disney was losing billions of dollars on streaming. That’s why that year’s D23 Expo was a blue sky session, and conversely, why the 2024 presentation had a lot of blockbuster announcements. Streaming has finally started to stabilize and attained profitability, in large part because spending has been reined in.

What’s promising about this Spaceship Earth project, I guess, is that the pilot order comes after all of those comments. Disney has already scaled back on streaming spending pretty significantly, suggesting that the Spaceship Earth series is the cream that rose to the top.

As for the Spaceship Earth series (which, again, has the following description: “When a mission to avert an imminent global cataclysm goes awry, a small band of teenagers from Earth’s past and future must join forces to confront a threat as vast and mysterious as time itself”) being the cream of the crop: you sure ’bout that, Disney?!

More than any Disney+ project that’s been announced in the last few years, this has a circa-2020 vibe to it. Like something from back when streamers had unlocked the infinite money glitch, greenlighting any and every concept presented to them and throwing massive piles of money at every showrunner.

Suffice to say, this Spaceship Earth series sounds…how do I put this delicately…unnecessary? (That’s me being charitable and diplomatic.) Quite simply, no one was asking for this. Not even the most diehard EPCOT Center enthusiasts. To borrow yet another meme, “Disney’s producers were so preoccupied with whether they could make a Spaceship Earth show, that they didn’t stop to think about if they should.”

Maybe this show is necessary, but not as an attraction tie-in. Don’t get me wrong. I love the parks properties getting love. But at the same time, it seems like whatever connection there is to the EPCOT icon will either be tenuous or tortured. And if it’s not, the show probably won’t be very good.

The best case is that the creators are using the name cachet of Spaceship Earth as a way to get a project greenlit at a time when the streaming purse strings have tightened. (Similar to the upcoming Resident Evil by Zach Cregger, which looks like a great film…but bears very little resemblance to the iconic game, its characters, or Raccoon City.)

If this is just a name recognition play to get a pitch they love off the drawing board, so be it. Honestly, I hope that’s all it is, because the actual attraction does not strike me as something that is begging for an adaptation.

It’s also worth mentioning that this Spaceship Earth pilot comes against the backdrop of a rumored refurbishment or reimagining to Spaceship Earth, the EPCOT attraction. Even if these particular rumors are not credible and nothing is announced at D23 for SSE, it’s an inevitability at some point before EPCOT’s 50th Anniversary.

Whenever there’s a project like this, there’s always the understandable fan anxiety that things will come full circle. The attraction that inspired the adaptation will then, in turn, be inspired by the adaptation. Like what happened at Pirates of the Caribbean with Captain Jack Sparrow being added after the film franchise took off.

That happened due to the runaway popularity of the movies and confused guests not being aware that the movies were based on the ride, and wondering why Captain Jack wasn’t in the attraction.

At the risk of stating the obvious, we’re a long, long way from that happening with Spaceship Earth. At this point, the reimagining and pilot are almost certainly completely unrelated and coincidental.

For all of its synergistic faults, Disney would not plan to update an iconic attraction with an unproven streaming series, let alone a pilot that was just ordered. They didn’t do it with Jungle Cruise, Haunted Mansion, Tower of Terror, Country Bear Jamboree, etc., and they won’t do it here.

Now, if the Spaceship Earth reimagining is delayed until 2028 or whenever, and this goes to series in between now and then and ends up being a cultural phenomenon on par with Stranger Things, we reserve the right to revisit this commentary. That is very obviously a long, long way from happening. More likely, the first article we’re writing about the Spaceship Earth series is also the last. Because like so many others, it’s probably going nowhere.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that this is yet another example of the studio side of Disney adapting original theme parks IP. (Or attempting to do so.) Previously, former Disney CEO Bob Iger boasted that “almost all” of the company’s $60 billion investment in the parks over the next decade would be based on popular intellectual property from the movies.

As we pointed out in “Is Anyone Surprised Disney’s $60 Billion Park Investments Will Be ‘Almost All’ IP?,” there should be a balance. We are certainly not anti-synergy or against areas and attractions based on movies. To the contrary, there are some lands and rides that only really resonate thanks to the movie connection. ‘Stepping into a movie in real life’ can be a special and truly emotional experience. That’s hard to deny.

But the Disney flywheel can and should (and has!) cut in both directions! New franchises and brands have to be born somewhere, and there won’t even be the opportunity for this type of theme park inspired show or movie in the future if nothing original is built in the parks. They’ll have exhausted everything original, and the parks-to-screen pipeline will dry up unless more original additions are built at Walt Disney World and Disneyland. Perhaps that’s why they’ve settled on Spaceship Earth for the next adaptation; because everything else has already been pitched?!

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YOUR THOUGHTS

What do you expect from a Spaceship Earth series? Are you excited? Skeptical? A little of both? Think this show will actually get made, or end up being the victim of budget cuts like other streaming and studio projects? Any other thoughts, insights, etc? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!