Trivia / Disneyland Paris

• Contractual Obligation Project: The contract between Disney and the French government for the park's initial construction mandated that Disney must build a new theme park (up to a total of three) within the resort each decade, or else the land earmarked for it will be sold off. That is among the reasons why Walt Disney Studios Park opened in such an underdeveloped state; it needed to be open by 2002 or else. That lesson caused Disney to negotiate an extension on the deadline for the third park, with it currently having a construction deadline of 2036.
• Troubled Production: There was a time in The '90s when the mere mention of "Euro Disney" was all it took to get a crowd laughing even if none of them were theme park or Disney enthusiasts, such was the bad press it got in its early years from the many unforced errors Disney made in the process of building it. For starters, they built it right outside Paris, a city that gets pretty chilly in the winter and already has an inexhaustible wealth of tourist attractions, rather than a place like the Riviera or Spain that would be more suitable to a year-round theme park. Then, between their ban on wine at the park, their fights with French labor unions over appearance codes, unwise statements on the part of Michael Eisner saying the park would be a direct transplant of the Magic Kingdom, and Disney's general reputation, they did everything in their power to convince the French that the park would make a mockery of their culture, to the point that newspapers were running editorials savaging it as a "cultural Chernobyl" and calling for it to be burned to the ground. By 1995, Disney had turned the park around, but the jokes would keep flying for many years after.

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