Disney Has a New Home for Iron Man
Disney spent last weekend in Anaheim laying out what it has coming, and the two biggest character returns in three days of announcements were Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man and Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. Neither one is in a film. Both are rides, and neither ride opens before 2028.
The movie dates came first, at the Disney Entertainment showcase on Friday, August 14. The parks showcase followed. That is where the news actually was.
Four Avengers, one building
Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure is doubling in size, with two attractions arriving in 2028. Avengers Infinity Defense casts you as a new recruit: Ms. Marvel, played by Iman Vellani, gives the pre-mission briefing, and the job is reassembling the Avengers against King Thanos. Downey is in it as Iron Man, alongside Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Anthony Mackie as Captain America and Chris Hemsworth as Thor. The second, Stark Flight Lab, is a Stark Industries training experience with Downey, Mackie and Brie Larson all reprising their film roles.
Read that cast list again. It is a fuller Avengers assembly than the films have managed in years, and it will live inside a building in Anaheim.
Ford is not performing in his
In Florida, Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent is coming to Disney's Animal Kingdom: an expedition into an ancient Maya temple, legendary creatures, an enormous serpent out of Maya mythology. Ford turned up in a surprise video to announce his part in it, and his part is this. He is the model for the animatronic. Not a voice session, not a cameo. His face, scanned and rebuilt in silicone and servos. Disney says it is the first time Ford's face has appeared on one of its attractions anywhere in the world.
Ford last played the character on screen in 2023, in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The next Indiana Jones is a machine wearing him.
So which one is the sad one
Tony Stark died on screen in 2019, and Marvel staged it as a real ending, the rarest thing a franchise this size ever commits to. Four months from now, Downey walks back into cinemas in Avengers: Doomsday as Doctor Doom. Same actor, different character, in the story that follows the one his hero closed.
The instinct is to call the ride the sad part. Rides are where characters go when the films are done with them: the theme-park afterlife, the gift shop at the end of the story. That instinct is backwards.
A ride does not have to explain itself. No continuity to protect, no resurrection to justify, no scene where somebody says the words that quietly undo an ending. You lower the harness, Iron Man is there, the machine owes you no reason. That is an honest home for a hero who already got his goodbye. Nobody leaves Avengers Campus thinking Tony Stark is alive.
The recast is the compromise. Putting Downey back into the same universe under a different mask is a bet on a performer instead of a character, and it reads as an admission that nobody in the current lineup can carry the thing alone. It may well work. Downey is a very good reason to buy a ticket. It is still the move made from the weaker position.
The fair objection is Ford. An actor handing his face to a machine that will keep performing his most famous role long after he stops is genuinely strange, and if it unsettles you, that is a reasonable place to stand. But Indiana Jones was assembled out of serial parts from the start: a temple, a trap, a snake, a hat, a man who is scared and walks in anyway. Raiders of the Lost Ark was already an act of preservation, a 1930s adventure serial rebuilt for 1981. A temple in Florida that runs him on a loop is not a betrayal of that idea. It may be the most literal version of it.
The rest of it
Villains Land is coming to Magic Kingdom: a corrupted Wishing Well in a foreboding forest where the villains claim its dark magic, a Maleficent coaster, and a dark ride built around the Evil Queen's Magic Mirror with several villains inside it. The film dates are Avengers: Doomsday on December 18, 2026, a third Frozen on November 24, 2027, a live-action Tangled on March 31, 2028, and the X-Men film on May 5, 2028.
Two follow-ups to animated films you have already seen, a live-action rebuild of one of them, two Marvel team-ups. The genuinely new ideas are in the rides. That is an odd sentence to have to write about a film studio.
What to put on tonight
2028 is a long time to hold a feeling, and the cure is already on a shelf.
Start with Iron Man, and watch it for how small it is: a mid-budget film about a man in a cave building something, Downey improvising his way through it. Every beat the new rides are reproducing was invented there, before anyone knew it was a foundation.
Then Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is what the Jade Serpent is reaching for. If you have seen it only once, watch Ford's face in the map room. That is the performance an animatronic has to clear.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is Ford's own last word on the character, and worth judging first-hand rather than through other people's. And before December, refresh the 2008 Downey, so the Doom in Avengers: Doomsday has something to push against.
