Disney Parks at D23 2026: Every New Land and Ride

Saturday night is parks night at D23 2026. The Horizons: Disney Experiences showcase, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, begins at 7:00 p.m. PT (10:00 p.m. ET) and streams on Disney+. Going in, here is every new land and ride attraction Disney has announced across its parks, and where each one stands right now.

Every project we are tracking

Two years ago this month, Josh D’Amaro stood on a stage at the Honda Center, the arena a couple of miles up the road from Disneyland’s front gates, and set the terms for the whole night. “We have Imagineers in place right now all around the world because everything we’re going to share with you is in active development,” he said. “Plans are drawn. Dirt is moving. I just want to be clear about this: We are doing everything you’re going to hear tonight.”

Then he announced the biggest slate of park building Disney had ever put in one evening, and the room came apart. That was Saturday, August 10, 2024. On Saturday the company does it again, same building, and if the pattern holds there will be another wall of concept art and another set of standing ovations. Disney has even named this year’s showcase Horizons: A Carousel of Progress and spent the past week signaling that 2026 leans more to updates than new reveals, which makes this a perfect weekend to see how each of those projects is coming along.

So before any of that, here is the full picture. Here is every new land and ride attraction Disney announced that night, and where each one stands right now, going into the weekend.

Every project we are tracking

One note on what is counted. That night also brought a nighttime parade, two lounges, an Audio-Animatronic figure of Walt Disney, several nighttime shows and four cruise ships. Good news, all of it, and none of it is on this list. We are counting only new lands and ride attractions, because those are the things that take years, cost the most and are the hardest to walk back.

Most of these are in active development, and several are already rising on site. Where Disney has attached a year, it has hit it. Where it has not yet, that simply means the date is still to come, and we will add it here the moment Disney gives one.

When Disney names a year, it hits it

Here is the part the delay stories skip, and it is the one that should actually build your trust. When Disney commits to a year, it has kept its word.

Test Track was announced that night with a firm commitment: “a reimagined Test Track presented by Chevrolet races into EPCOT in 2025.” It reopened on July 22, 2025. Promise made, promise kept, inside the year it was made for.

Tropical Americas at Disney’s Animal Kingdom was given 2027 in the announcement itself, and Disney has not moved off it. On April 30, 2026, its own parks blog was still writing the sentence in the present tense: “When it opens in 2027, the new land will represent one of the most culturally rich regions on the planet.” The land replaces DinoLand U.S.A. with a town called Pueblo Esperanza, an Indiana Jones ride-through set in a newly discovered Maya temple, and the first-ever Encanto attraction at a Disney park.

There is a third data point worth having, even though it does not belong on the tracker. World of Frozen at Disney Adventure World in Paris was announced years before D23 2024 and only had its 2026 target restated there. It opened on March 29, 2026. Arendelle is standing and the mountain is up.

Three commitments with years attached. Two of those years have already been met and the third has not slipped. That is a good record, and it is exactly why the absence of a year on everything else matters.

The nine in active development

The villains land at Magic Kingdom, which Disney still lists only as a villains-themed land. Piston Peak National Park. Monstropolis. The Avengers Campus expansion and the Coco and Avatar projects at Disney California Adventure. The Lion King ride-through in Paris. The Spider-Man coaster in Shanghai and the Spider-Man attraction at Hong Kong’s Stark Expo.

Every one is listed by Disney today as coming, and several are visibly under way. Site work on the villains land show buildings started this summer. Shanghai began laying track for its Spider-Man coaster in the spring. The Avengers rides at California Adventure have gone vertical, the Monsters, Inc. coaster is climbing over Hollywood Studios, and a model of Piston Peak is due on the show floor this weekend. That is real money and real steel. Disney has not attached an opening year to the nine yet, and several are already well under way.

That is not a scandal and it is not a slip. Announcing a land and announcing an opening date are two separate events at this company, often years apart, and Disney is under no obligation to hurry the second one. But the gap between those two events is where almost everything you will read about Disney parks across this weekend is going to live.

The biggest news since D23 did not happen at D23

Here is the strange part about the last two years. The single largest thing Disney has announced for its parks since that Anaheim weekend did not happen on a D23 stage at all. On May 7, 2025, Bob Iger unveiled Disneyland Abu Dhabi, a whole new resort on Yas Island and the seventh Disney destination on Earth. It is the company’s first park in the Middle East. It is being built and operated by the Abu Dhabi firm Miral, with Disney’s Imagineers leading the design. And true to the pattern on this board, it was announced without an opening date, and it still does not have one. We gave it its own story: Disney’s biggest parks announcement since D23 did not happen at D23.

Two promises from the 2024 slate did more than survive. They opened. EPCOT’s reimagined Test Track came back on July 22, 2025, the exact year Disney named for it. And in Paris, the long-struggling second gate reopened on March 29, 2026 as Disney Adventure World, with the fully built World of Frozen land opening the same day, also on schedule. Where Disney attached a year to something, the year held. Both have their own entries in the tracker above.

Off the parks entirely, Disney kept expanding at sea. The Disney Treasure joined the fleet in late 2024, and in March 2026 the Disney Adventure became the line’s first ship based in Asia, sailing out of Singapore, part of a stated plan to roughly double the cruise fleet by 2031. None of it shared a stage with the rides on this board. All of it is part of the same growth story the showcase only partly tells.

So when the tracker looks like a long list of projects still to come, remember it is only the D23 slice. The fuller picture of the last two years includes a park rising in the desert, two promises actually kept, and a fleet still growing. This weekend’s showcase is the next chapter, not the whole book.

Two projects that got their names later

When Disney announced the Cars project, its own post called it “a new area inspired by the Pixar Animation Studios film Cars” coming to “a reimagined section of Frontierland.” No land name at all. The name everyone uses now, Piston Peak National Park, arrived later, along with an explanation of the theming as national park “Parkitecture” with geysers, waterfalls and snowcapped peaks.

In the meantime a great deal of the coverage just called it Cars Land. Cars Land is a real place, and it is in California. It opened at Disney California Adventure on June 15, 2012. Disney has never used that name for the Magic Kingdom project, and a reader searching for it spent a year finding stories about a different land in a different state.

The Monsters, Inc. land at Disney’s Hollywood Studios went the same way. Announced without a name, revealed later as Monstropolis, with Harryhausen’s, the Glob Theater, and the first suspended coaster at a Disney park.

Sorting the real news from the rumors

This is the part worth keeping open in a tab during the show.

On July 2 this year, one outlet ran the headline “Tropical Americas Land Faces Major Delay.” Inside that same article: “Nothing has been officially delayed, and Disney has not changed its public timeline,” and, of the renewed permit the entire piece rests on, “permit extensions are fairly common during large-scale Disney projects.”

Three weeks later, on July 25, the same outlet ran “Long-Awaited Villains Land Opening Pushed Further Back.” Pushed back from what? The article answers that itself: “Of course, Disney has not confirmed any delay or revised timeline,” and “Disney still has not announced an official opening date for Villains Land.” The 2029 to 2030 window in the headline came from people reading construction permits, not from Disney.

You cannot delay a date that was never set. Both of those stories say so, several paragraphs below a headline claiming the opposite, and both will be shared as fact.

Two numbers are worth watching for in particular. You will see 2027 hung on several of these lands as though Disney promised it. Disney did not. It is a working target that outlets and fans have penciled in, and a pencil is what it stays until someone says it on that stage. You will also see 2028, lifted from a construction permit for Piston Peak and the villains land. That permit covers utilities and infrastructure, not the rides, and the firm that filed it said so plainly. A date for the pipes is not a date for the park.

None of that makes the fan sites villains. Permit-watching is real work and some of it is excellent, and those outlets often surface things Disney would rather nobody noticed. The problem is the distance between what the reporting found and what the headline claims, and that distance always widens during an event, because everybody is racing.

How we are covering it this weekend

We will be slower than the fan sites during the showcase. Probably by an hour, sometimes more. That is deliberate, and it is the only promise on this page we can make with total confidence.

Everything Disney says goes into this story as it happens. Everything credible but unconfirmed sits in the holding block below, labelled, until Disney says it. Rumour does not appear here at all, in any form, including the polite form where a publication repeats a rumour while noting that it is one.

And nothing gets quietly deleted. If we put something up and it turns out to be wrong, it gets corrected in the story and recorded in the log at the bottom, in those words. A page that changes forty times over a weekend is only worth reading if you can see what changed.

One number to hold on to

Eleven lands and attractions announced. Two given a year. Both years met.

That is not a criticism of Disney, which is building more right now than at almost any point in its history and has never promised to date things on a fan’s schedule. It is a measurement of how much of what comes off that stage is a commitment and how much is a beautiful painting of somewhere that does not exist yet.

Both are worth being excited about on Saturday night. Only one of them is a date.

This is part of our full coverage of the weekend. For everything happening at the event, see our D23 2026 hub.

A small nod to Walt at the Imagineering pavilion

Not every reveal is a new land. Over at the Imagineering: Horizons pavilion, Disney gave Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress a warm little moment, showing two new costumes for the Magic Kingdom classic, one from the 1960s scene and one from the Future finale, along with a brand new attraction poster inspired by the original. It is a small thing, and exactly the kind of detail Carousel fans love to catch.

A new friend at Droid Depot for the Star Wars fans

Over in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, Droid Depot is adding Batuu Adventure Buddies, interactive companions that start with an Ewok at Disneyland park, with Grogu and a Huttlet to follow and all three coming to Disney’s Hollywood Studios after that. Each one has LCD eyes, little expressions, and a mix of sounds, taps on the head to respond, and can even kick off an Endor Dance Party with the optional gear packs.

Decoded: what these reveals actually tell you

Line the parks announcements up and a pattern emerges that is less about bold new visions than about catching up. Disney is finally fixing things fans have complained about for years: the Disco Yeti on Expedition Everest, dormant for most of the ride’s life, is being restored to full motion; Spaceship Earth is getting its first real update in nearly two decades; and Dreamfinder, written out of EPCOT twenty-eight years ago, is coming back after a long fan campaign. Alongside the deferred maintenance sits a lean on villains and nostalgia, an entire land built around a corrupted wishing well and a Maleficent coaster.

That is a revealing mix. The headline expansions are real and expensive, but the emotional center of the weekend was Disney answering old wishes and repairing old disappointments rather than inventing the next Haunted Mansion. For a company that once defined itself by building things no one had seen, the 2026 parks slate reads as a promise to stop breaking faith with the fans it already has. Whether that is a confident strategy or a defensive one depends on how many of these projects survive the years between announcement and opening day, which at Disney is where a good many reveals quietly go to die.

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Live updates

[Aug 14, 4:13 p.m. PT] Disney opened the Imagineering: Horizons pavilion on Day 1 with a Promenade of Progress of models and maquettes for parks projects worldwide, from Tropical Americas and Piston Peak to Disney California Adventure’s Avengers Campus, Coco, and Avatar plans, plus Tokyo’s redesigned Space Mountain and a first-ever Wreck-It Ralph attraction.