These 8 Disney World Attractions Should Be Made Into Movies

With such upcoming live-action adaptations as Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo, and Pinocchio in the works, Disney is busy raiding its catalogue of cartoon classics. But animation isn’t the studio’s only resource. Disney also has a wealth of iconic theme-park attractions to turn to.

A fifth Pirates of the Caribbean is in production now and next month, the studio will release Tomorrowland, a sci-fi adventure starring George Clooney that’s based Walt Disney’s optimistic vision for a gleaming future. There’s a movie adaptation of the UN-approved tunnel of diversity, It’s a Small World, in the works, with National Treasure director Jon Turtletaub attached. And in news that broke Thursday, Ryan Gosling is in talks to star in director Guillermo del Toro’s movie version of The Haunted Mansion.

It’s likely that Disney will continue to turn their rides and attractions into movies, so we have some suggestions for future films that the company can make based on some Disney World and Disneyland favorites:

Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Cafe

We’ll start off with a less obvious one: Cosmic Ray is a restaurant in Tomorrowland, but the food and drink isn’t the real attraction or the reason to make a movie. At the front of the seating area of the restaurant is an animatronic alien lounge singer named Sonny Eclipse, who sings pun-filled space songs on a loop. We can imagine a movie about a down-and-out alien lounge singer with a sharp sense of humor who gets sucked into a wild interstellar adventure, and uses his singing skills and centuries of knowledge playing seedy space clubs to save the universe. Just watch the video above and tell us you wouldn’t see a movie about that charmer.

Splash Mountain (Disney/Associated Press)

Splash Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad

These two rides are more obvious sources, but they come with some baggage. Splash Mountain is one of the Disney Parks’ signature attractions, but it includes songs and characters derived from the 1946 movie Song of the South, the racist 1946 feature that’s disappeared into the Disney vault. But the movie we’re imagining would be western adventure that connects Big Thunder Mountain Railroad — which has no movie history attached (but almost became a TV series) — that sends a coal miner who robs the crooked mine owner riding through Frontierland. He goes from the depths of the underground to the heights of the famed waterfall, where he hides out and discovers magical creatures — before the mine owners track him down and spoil the tranquility of the secret mountain. He has to take a leap of faith: Is going down the steep mountain suicide, or the key to getting away and restoring order to the world?

Golden Horseshoe Revue

Longtime Disneyland fans came to know and love actress Betty Taylor, who played Slue Foot Sue for three decades in over 45,000 appearances at the Frontierland musical show based on the legend of Pecos Bill. The show ended in 1986 and Taylor died in 2011, a day after her longtime costar Wally Borg (Pecos Bill) passed away. It’s an incredible story that seems tailor-made for Disney, so we’d suggest a movie based on their long-running show.

The Great Movie Ride (Scott Smith/Flickr)

The Great Movie Ride

A meta movie about the magic of movies, based on a ride about the magic of movies! This makes sense, synergy-wise, because Disney just signed a partnership with the TCM cable network to sponsor a refurbished version of the ride. Of course, the new theoretical movie would require a lot of rights clearances — movies from MGM, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Paramount, and United Artists are featured throughout the ride — but they could always replace them with Disney movies… especially with Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm in the fold. It’d be sort of like the video game Disney Infinity — imagine jumping between classic Disney movies and properties, bringing together characters you always wanted to see team-up.

Enchanted Tiki Room

It may seem kitschy now, but when this ride opened in 1963, it was absolutely groundbreaking: The show pioneered audio-animatronics, which was an invention of WED Enterprises, Disney’s engineering corps now known as Imagineers. We’d love to see a movie about an Amazon explorer who stumbles upon a room filled with talking birds — who lead him into a lost civilization of talking animals. Disney has done stuff about talking animals, right?

Main Street Electric Parade

One of Disneyland and Disney World’s most popular and successful parades, it was actually an early example of the power of synthesizers and electronic pop music. (As it turns out, a lot of Disney attractions were ahead of their time.) This movie could be about really anything, as long as its neon and cool. Perhaps Nicholas Winding-Refn could direct it, if Disney would be willing to role the dice.

The Matterhorn (coconut wireless/Flickr)

The Matterhorn

This one is a little bit of a cheat, because Disney actually was developing a movie based on this old favorite toboggan ride back in 2011. No plot was announced, but the movie was to be called The Hill, which sounds like an action adventure movie. Perhaps shades of the alpine scenes in the upcoming James Bond flick, SPECTRE? No word whether that version of the movie is still in development, just as it’s uncertain whether Magic Kingdom, an all-encompassing theme park film that was being developed by Jon Favreau at the same time, will ever happen. Maybe after they make all the movies that we recommend above, they can bring them all together in an Avengers-style blowout.