It worked well enough for Pirates of the Caribbean, so Disney will be adapting their Space Mountain intellectual property for the silver screen, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The indoor, interplanetary-themed roller coaster opened in Florida’s Walt Disney World in 1975, and variants now exist at five of the six current Disney theme parks. While big on ambiance, it doesn’t exactly have characters or a story, or even tableaux vignettes to draw from like Pirates, unless you count the part where suddenly you find yourself zooming through a glowing tube and everybody goes “ahhhhh!”
That’s where Joby Harold comes in. The English writer-producer, whose previous work includes the screenplay for Guy Ritchie‘s King Arthur, exec producing the third John Wick film, and directing the Hayden Christensen/Jessica Alba medical horror movie Awake, has been tasked with finding three acts nestled inside this legendary e-ticket ride.
Harold is already in Disney’s employ, working on the Obi-Wan Kenobi series starring Ewan McGregor for Disney +. He’s also working on a continuation of the Transformers series for Paramount.
In other rides-turned-film news, Disney announced in late June that Margot Robbie was developing a Pirates of the Caribbean spinoff with Birds of Prey scribe Christina Hodson. (This is in addition to what Chernobyl‘s Craig Mazin and Pirates originator Ted Elliot are cooking up for a previously announced series reboot.)
Space Mountain is, according to MousePlanet.com, the first roller coaster in which passengers rode, in part, through total darkness. The idea came directly from Walt Disney, during some brainstorms for a redesigned Space Port at Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. The Florida Space Mountain has a 26 foot drop, Tokyo’s is 17, and the California one is a mere 10 feet. The Paris Space Mountain was, for a spell, called Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune. It maintains a kind of whimsical, Georges Méliès appearance. The Hong Kong one, the newest, has a warmer, sippy cup-plastic look compared to the brutal, white Logan’s Run-esque 70s originals. The non-Florida rides have, at times, been rebranded Hyperspace Mountain to fit a Star Wars theme.
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