Disney’s First Coco Ride Is Taking Shape at California Adventure

Picture a boat drifting under a bridge built from marigold petals, into a city that glows in the dark and climbs to the sky on the stacked bones of everyone’s ancestors. That was the image Disney put on the screen at D23 in Anaheim in August 2024, when Josh D’Amaro announced that Pixar’s Coco was getting its first ride at any Disney park anywhere. The pitch was simple. You join Miguel on a trip to the Land of the Dead. There is music, there are skeletons, and there is technology we have not seen yet.

D’Amaro leaned into that last part. Imagineering, he said, would reach back to the company’s own greatest hits, Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean, and bring the skeletal cast to life “in a big way through the latest Audio-Animatronics technology.” As he put it, “These figures will appear in ways you’ll have to see to believe.” Then Ernesto de la Cruz, the film’s silver-throated villain, walked out and performed, and the room came apart.

If you have seen the movie, you already know why it belongs on a ride. A boy named Miguel who just wants to play guitar. A dog named Dante. A bridge of marigold petals, and a whole neon city of the dead where your family waits for you as long as someone back home still remembers them. It is warm and it is a little sad and it is packed with music, which is exactly the raw material Imagineering knows how to turn into a dark ride.

Here is where things stand today. Two years on, the reveal still centers on that feeling and that painting, and more details are still to come. The ride does not have a name yet. Disney has not announced a ride system, though the concept art shows water and boats and the company keeps name-checking two of its most famous boat and ghost rides. Disney has not announced an opening date yet. For a film this beloved, the feeling and the painting were plenty to get fans excited.

The Coco ride is part of a real overhaul of Disney California Adventure, the park that has spent two decades earning its place next to Disneyland. Alongside Coco, Disney has announced an Avatar experience with its own boat ride and a slice of Pandora, plus a large expansion of Avengers Campus. It is the most ambitious set of projects the resort has taken on in years.

From a painting to ground taking shape

So where does it actually stand today. The site sits backstage, in the working guts of the park behind the Incredicoaster at Pixar Pier, tucked between Paradise Gardens Park and Disneyland Drive. In January 2026, the first real sign of movement showed up. Crews cleared shrubs and foliage, put up temporary fencing and green screening, and dropped in around seven temporary buildings to run the job. That is how these things begin, quietly, with landscaping crews and permits.

By late June 2026, the site looked busier and more deliberate. A new internal roadway had been paved and lined with green fencing and red water barriers. Crews were laying utility conduit, grading the ground into defined elevation changes, and running excavators across staged piles of gravel and dirt, with wooden ramps bridging the trenches for the underground work. Black scrim fencing went up along Disneyland Drive to keep the street from peeking in, and fresh shrubs were planted along the fence line.

This is the stage the project is in right now. The work you can see is site prep, the plumbing and grading that comes before a foundation goes in. The project was expected to break ground in 2026, and the ground is very much being broken. Vertical construction, the show building and track and boats, is still ahead.

There is real momentum here. Disney has money in the dirt, a public commitment on the record, and the surrounding DCA projects are moving in parallel, which is usually how you tell a resort means it. Coco is still early, a gorgeous idea with pipe going in under it, and the news fans are waiting for is almost certainly ahead of us. The next real chance for it is D23 2026, where a name, a ride system, or a date would turn this from a painting into a plan.

The latest

This story is tracked live and will update if D23 2026 moves it.

This is part of our live tracker of every new land and ride Disney announced at D23 2024. See where all eleven stand: D23 2026, live: every Disney parks reveal, and the latest on what is coming.

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Live updates

[Aug 14, 4:13 p.m. PT] At the Imagineering: Horizons pavilion, Disney shared a first look at the Coco attraction coming to Disney California Adventure, including a queue rendering and a sculpt of Hector.