Disneyland Paris
Disneyland Paris is an entertainment resort in Marne-la-Vallée, France, located about east of the city centre of Paris. It encompasses two theme parks, seven Disney-owned hotels, two convention centers, a golf course, an arena, and a shopping, dining and entertainment complex. Opened on 12 April 1992, the resort is operated by Disney Experiences, a division of the Walt Disney Company.
It is the second Disney park outside the United States, following the opening of the Tokyo Disney Resort in 1983. Disneyland Paris is the only Disney resort outside of the United States to be completely owned by the company. Disneyland Park, opened in 1992, is the original theme park of the complex. A second theme park, Walt Disney Studios Park, opened in 2002.
The resort is located on approximately of land which is being developed under a master agreement with French governmental authorities. About half of the land has been developed, including a planned community, Val d'Europe.
Disneyland Paris is Europe's most-visited theme park, and the largest single-site employer in France with 17,000 employees. It generated $343 million in profit for Disney in 2023. By 2022, 375 million people had visited the park.
Ownership
The Walt Disney Company announced a plan to rescue the financially struggling Disneyland Paris resort, the Financial Times reported on 6 October 2014. The park was burdened by its debt, which at the time was calculated at about , roughly 15 times its gross average earnings.Up to that point, Disney only held a minority ownership stake in the resort. In early 2017, the company purchased 9% of Euro Disney S.C.A., buying 9% from Kingdom Holding and issued a tender offer of €2 per share for the remaining stock. This brought The Walt Disney Company's total ownership to 85.7%. The Walt Disney company also invested an additional to strengthen and develop Disneyland Paris. In June 2017, Disney completed its tender offer and at the time owned over 97% of Euro Disney. It then implemented a full buyout of the shares they did not already own. In 2018, after taking full control of Disneyland Paris, Walt Disney reported its plans to invest into the Disneyland Paris resort.
History
Seeking a location for a European resort
Following the success of Disneyland in California, plans to build a similar theme park in Europe emerged in 1966 with sites in Frankfurt, Paris, London or Milan under consideration. Under the leadership of E. Cardon Walker, Tokyo Disneyland opened in 1983 in Japan with instant success, forming a catalyst for international expansion. In late 1984 the heads of Disney's theme park division, Dick Nunis and Jim Cora, presented a list of approximately 1,200 possible European locations for the park. Britain, France, Italy and Spain were all considered. However, Britain and Italy were dropped from the list due to both lacking a suitable expanse of flat land. By March 1985, the number of possible locations for the park had been reduced to four; two in France and two in Spain. Both nations saw the potential economic advantages of a Disney theme park and offered competing financing deals to Disney.Both Spanish sites were located near the Mediterranean and offered a subtropical climate similar to Disney's parks in California and Florida. Disney had asked each site to provide average temperatures for every month for the previous 40 years, which proved a complicated endeavour as none of the records were computerised. The site in Pego, Alicante became the front-runner, but the location was controversial as it would have meant the destruction of Marjal de Pego-Oliva marshlands, a site of natural beauty and one of the last homes of the almost extinct Samaruc or Valencia Toothcarp, so there was some local outcry among environmentalists. Disney had also shown interest in a site near Toulon in southern France, not far from Marseille. The pleasing landscape of that region, as well as its climate, made the location a top competitor for what would be called Euro Disneyland. However, shallow bedrock was encountered beneath the site, which would have rendered construction too difficult. Finally, a site in the rural town of Marne-la-Vallée was chosen because of its proximity to Paris and its central location in Western Europe. This location was estimated to be no more than a four-hour drive for 68 million people and no more than a two-hour flight for a further 300 million.
Michael Eisner signed the first letter of agreement with the French government for the site on 18 December 1985, and the first financial contracts were drawn up during the following spring. The final contract was signed by the leaders of the Walt Disney Company and the French government and territorial collectivities on 24 March 1987. Construction began in August 1988, and in December 1990, an information centre named "Espace Euro Disney" was opened to show the public what was being constructed at the time. Plans for a theme park next to Euro Disneyland based on the entertainment industry, Disney-MGM Studios Europe, quickly went into development, scheduled to open in 1995 with a construction budget of US$2.3 billion. The construction manager was Bovis.
Design and construction
To provide lodging to patrons, it was decided that 5,200 Disney-owned hotel rooms would be built within the complex. In March 1988, Disney and a council of architects decided on an exclusively American theme in which each hotel would depict a region of the United States. At the time of the opening in April 1992, seven hotels collectively housing 5,800 rooms had been built.An entertainment, shopping, and dining complex based on Walt Disney World's Downtown Disney was designed by Frank Gehry.
With its towers of oxidised silver and bronze-coloured stainless steel under a canopy of lights, it opened as Festival Disney. For a projected daily attendance of 55,000, Euro Disney planned to serve an estimated 14,000 people per hour inside the Euro Disneyland park. To accomplish this, 29 restaurants were built inside the park. Menus and prices were varied with an American flavor predominant and Disney's precedent of not serving alcoholic beverages was continued in the park.
2,300 patio seats were installed to satisfy Europeans' expected preference of eating outdoors in good weather. In test kitchens at Walt Disney World, recipes were adapted for European tastes. Walter Meyer, executive chef for menu development at Euro Disney and executive chef of food projects development at Walt Disney World noted, "A few things we did need to change, but most of the time people kept telling us, 'Do your own thing. Do what's American'."
Recruitment/employment
Unlike Disney's American theme parks, Euro Disney aimed for permanent employees, as opposed to seasonal and temporary part-time employees. Casting centres were set up in Paris, London, and Amsterdam. However, it was understood by the French government and Disney that "a concentrated effort would be made to tap into the local French labour market". Disney sought workers with sufficient communication skills, who spoke two European languages, and were socially outgoing. Following precedent, Euro Disney set up its own Disney University to train workers. 24,000 people had applied by November 1991.In 2011, the park provided 55,643 direct and indirect jobs in France. According to Damien Audric, Director of Development and the Environment, Disneyland Paris would generate 63,000 jobs by 2022. Overall, in 2022, Disneyland Paris was still Seine-et-Marne's largest employer.
Controversies
The prospect of a Disney park in France was a subject of debate and controversy. Critics, who included prominent French intellectuals, denounced what they considered to be the cultural imperialism of Euro Disney and felt it would encourage an unhealthy American type of consumerism in France. On 28 June 1992, a group of French farmers blockaded Euro Disney in protest of farm policies supported at the time by the United States. A journalist at the centre-right French newspaper Le Figaro wrote, "I wish with all my heart that the rebels would set fire to Disneyland." Ariane Mnouchkine, a Parisian stage director, named the concept a "cultural Chernobyl", a phrase which would be echoed in the media during Euro Disney's initial years. In response, French philosopher Michel Serres noted, "It is not America that is invading us. It is we who adore it, who adopt its fashions and above all, its words." Euro Disney S.C.A.'s then-chairman Robert Fitzpatrick responded, "We didn't come in and say O.K., we're going to put a beret and a baguette on Mickey Mouse. We are who we are."Topics of controversy also included Disney's American managers requiring English to be spoken at all meetings and Disney's appearance code for members of staff, which listed regulations and limitations for the use of makeup, facial hair, tattoos, jewelry, and more. French labour unions mounted protests against the appearance code, which they saw as "an attack on individual liberty". Others criticized Disney as being insensitive to French culture, individualism, and privacy, because restrictions on individual or collective liberties were illegal under French law, unless it could be demonstrated that the restrictions are requisite to the job and do not exceed what is necessary. Disney countered by saying that a ruling that barred them from imposing such an employment standard could threaten the image and long-term success of the park. "For us, the appearance code has a great effect from a product identification standpoint," said Thor Degelmann, Euro Disney's personnel director. "Without it we couldn't be presenting the Disney product that people would be expecting."
In 2023, Disneyland Paris faced multiple strikes and protests by cast members demanding better pay and working conditions, including a €200 monthly wage increase, improved seniority bonuses, and double pay for Sundays.