Walt Disney Imagineering has pulled back the curtain on Avengers Infinity Defense with a first look at on-ride test footage and attraction vehicles for the upcoming Marvel E-Ticket that’s one of two attractions being built in Avengers Campus in California Adventure at Disneyland. This post shares everything we know about the new Marvel ride plus our commentary about this news.
The latest update comes hot on the heels of South by Southwest (SXSW), during which Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro and Disney Entertainment Co-Chairman Alan Bergman took the stage for a feature presentation about upcoming attractions at Walt Disney World, Disneyland, and beyond.
That culminated in a Marvel segment led by Bruce Vaughn, President and Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Imagineering and Kevin Feige, producer and president of Marvel Studios. They were touched upon a number of Marvel projects in development, but the focus was not on Avengers Infinity Defense, but rather, the secondary addition: Stark Flight Lab.
Only a few days later, Disney is pulling back the curtain a bit more on Avengers Infinity Defense, as part of a wide-ranging new entry into “We Call It Imagineering.” This is a fan-favorite video series that had been dormant for a while, but thankfully, has now been revived with a new episode revolving around the Ride Studio at WDI.
This episode takes you behind the scenes to see how rides come to life, and includes some of the same first look footage from SXSW for Stark Flight Lab, one of the Cars-themed attractions coming to Frontierland at Magic Kingdom, and the suspended Monsters, Inc. Doors Coaster heading to Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Those glimpses into the future are fun appetizers, but they’re far from the main course.
I highly recommend watching the Ride Studio episode of “We Call It Imagineering” for yourself:
The first highlight of the new Ride Studio episode of “We Call It Imagineering” episode is all of the behind-the-scenes footage showcasing existing attractions at Walt Disney World, Disneyland, and the international parks. There was footage I had never seen before from Soarin, Haunted Mansion, Millennium Falcon Smugglers Run, Cosmic Rewind, Shanghai Pirates, and more.
The bigger highlight was the interview with Disney Legend Bob Gurr, who designed many of the early ride systems for Disneyland. Bob Gurr is a true treasure, and one of the last original Imagineers who actually worked with Walt Disney. Anyone who has heard him talk knows that Gurr is a hoot, sharing humorous anecdotes, candid assessments, and emotion. Disney should be doing a full video series just with Bob Gurr. (A bit beside the point, but if you’ve yet to do so, I’d highly recommend attending D23 and third party panels sooner rather than later if you want to hear from the OGs like Gurr.)
Anyway, just a quick plug for the new “We Call It Imagineering” video because, selfishly, this is the type of content that’s right up my alley and I want to see it succeed. It helps renew my faith in Disney and is cool to see for geeks like me.
Moving to the topic at hand, this episode featured a first look at Avengers Infinity Defense that you might’ve missed, as it wasn’t referenced by name. Here’s the segment:
NEW: Disney shared a new look at development of Avengers Infinity Defense, the attraction coming to Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure Park. In the ride you’ll assemble with the Avengers and battle King Thanos across multiple worlds. pic.twitter.com/3an1bQKTeb
— Scott Gustin (@ScottGustin) March 10, 2025
The development of Avengers Infinity Defense has been a long saga, thus far involving four different D23 events, and several variants of the Marvel E-Ticket attraction. By the time all is said and done, it’ll likely encompass 6 different D23 events, well over a decade of development, and 10 years since the attraction was first teased around the opening of Mission Breakout.
Officially, the first announcement came during the 2019 D23 Expo, with Disney revealing plans for phase 2 of Avengers Campus. This was to become a brand-new E-Ticket attraction where guests will step on board a Quinjet and fly alongside the Avengers in an epic adventure to Wakanda and beyond.
In this shelved version of the attraction, guests were to team up alongside the Avengers in a battle to save the world from one of the most powerful villains they have ever faced. Disney indicated that Imagineers were conceiving an all-new innovative ride system to put you in the middle of the action in this Avengers E-Ticket.
Fast-forward to the 2022 D23 Expo, when dearly departed Disney CEO Bob Chapek personally revealed the King Thanos attraction during his opening remarks, before D’Amaro made the announcement a couple days later on stage. To the best of our knowledge, everything revealed about the attraction from this point on is still official and accurate.
According to Kevin Feige, Avengers Infinity Defense will occur in a version of the Multiverse where Thanos won. When joining battle with the Avengers, you never know what foes you’ll face from anywhere and everywhen. Avengers Infinity Defense will feature a brand new story.
This family-friendly attraction will give guests the opportunity to team up with more of the Avengers and their allies from across the Multiverse to battle against enemies, led by King Thanos.
Technology that allows the Avengers to jump between worlds has gone missing, and King Thanos is using it to wreak havoc everywhere. Recruits will travel to iconic locations like Asgard, Wakanda, and New York City alongside the likes of big, and small, heroes. You also just might find yourself face-to-face with King Thanos, too.
Marvel super heroes have created a new vehicle capable of jumping between worlds and even realities – on planet Earth and beyond.
The design combines elements of Tony Stark’s time-suits with Xandarian jump points and Wakandan technology to create a vehicle that combines portal technology and flight capabilities to maneuver through the skies, transporting heroes to remote worlds in a matter of moments.
The ride vehicle was on display in the Imagineering booth at the most recent D23 Expo, and it’s the same as the one utilized by Peter Pan’s Never Land Adventure in Fantasy Springs at Tokyo DisneySea. You can read our review, which describes that as Avatar Flight of Passage meets Universal’s Spider-Man, for somewhat of a “sneak peek” at what to expect from this Marvel E-Ticket.
The Ride Studio episode of “We Call It Imagineering” further corroborates our previous suspicions that Avengers Infinity Defense will basically be the Marvel version of Peter Pan’s Never Land Adventure. It shows some test footage of the ride vehicles, along with media that’s presumably of the attraction itself.
From my perspective, Avengers Infinity Defense being similar to Peter Pan’s Never Land Adventure is a good thing. It’s an engaging and exhilarating attraction, but not a thrill ride. That’s good, as DCA needs more family-friendly attractions.
Still, it won’t be suitable for everyone. Avengers Infinity Defense will almost certainly be in 3D (glasses are featured in the “We Call It Imagineering” video) and will cause motion sickness issues for some guests. For whatever it’s worth, I love Peter Pan’s Never Land Adventure–but it makes Sarah nauseated.
I would expect the ride profiles to be fairly similar, with Avengers Infinity Defense being a bit more intense while still fitting the family-friendly label. I don’t know how you do a completely family-friendly Marvel ride with a battle against King Thanos, but the Peter Pan ride does the same with Captain Hook–so who knows.
The bottom line is that Peter Pan’s Never Land Adventure is excellent–a long and meaty E-Ticket that leaves guests feeling satisfied (albeit some feeling sick). I’ll be very pleased if Avengers Infinity Defense is a clone of that ride system, profile, and track layout, and just swaps out Peter Pan and pals for Marvel. My guess is that it won’t be quite as long or immersive…but that’s the difference between Disney and OLC budgets.
During SXSW, Disney also revealed that the groundbreaking for the Avengers Campus occurred recently and work is now underway on the expansion. It’s nevertheless safe to say that this project is still several years away.
Avengers Infinity Defense could, in theory, open as soon as 2026 if Disneyland so desires. We suspect that they do not. Disney has likely learned the hard way that bifurcated land openings pack less of a punch, so we suspect the doubling of Avengers Campus will open all at once in 2027 or 2028.
Given the relative complexity of Avengers Infinity Defense, our best guess is that construction on that will take much longer. On the plus side, the facade is already built and the land is largely cleared backstage already. For the most part, it’s a matter of building a show building and then walling off a mostly-unused portion of Avengers Campus to connect the expansion.
Our best guess is that Avengers Infinity Defense opens between Christmas 2027 and Summer 2028. Here’s hoping that’s wrong, and Disney finds a way to condense its construction timeline. In all likelihood, these are the next new attractions to opening as part of Disneyland’s upcoming development cycle, so perhaps they’ll prioritize the project in an attempt to get it done by Summer 2027. Maybe in a different multiverse, Disney builds faster than Universal!
Right now, Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure feels like an incomplete land. Don’t get me wrong–Web Slingers is fun and the way the area is inhabited by characters is fantastic. Likewise, Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout is fantastic–far better than I ever expected. But the latter feels disconnected from the core land, and the actual campus itself needs more.
It doesn’t help that the only new ride to debut with the land was a Spider-Man ride that’s far inferior to the one Universal built some two decades ago. Disney’s interactive shooter game is fun, but no match for that modern marvel. The good news is that Avengers Infinity Defense will utilize a very similar ride system as Universal’s Spider-Man attraction. The bad news is that it’ll still be hard to compete with the quality of that classic.
Hopefully this E-Ticket addition is what makes the Marvel land feel complete. Avengers Infinity Defense should be good enough that it makes it easier to overlook the dull industrial design, along with the lackluster and played out ‘repurposed’ aesthetic of the land itself.
There’s a lot to love about the way characters are leveraged in Avengers Campus, but it’s still incomplete and underwhelming. Hopefully this blockbuster King Thanos Marvel Multiverse E-ticket attractions live up to the hype and power of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and makes Disney California Adventure an even better second gate.
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Your Thoughts
What do you think of Avengers Infinity Defense? Looking forward to the Marvel Multiverse E-Ticket coming to Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure? Are you a fan of the Marvel land as it presently exists, or do you agree that this E-Ticket and another secondary attraction are what’s needed to make the land feel complete and top-tier? Any questions? 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!
