Disney+ has cast the leads for its Spaceship Earth pilot. Catherine Laga’aia, Moana in Disney’s live-action remake, and Deacon Phillippe will headline it, Deadline reported on Monday. Phillippe, son of Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe, has appeared in Never Have I Ever and Motörheads. Character details are being kept under wraps, which seems only fair, since the ride’s main characters so far have been animatronic Phoenicians.
The pilot was ordered in August from 20th Television. Jason Fuchs (It: Welcome to Derry) is showrunner and co-wrote the script with Loki‘s Michael Waldron. Lee Toland Krieger (You, Shadow and Bone) directs. Going by the logline, a mission to prevent a global cataclysm goes wrong, leaving a small band of teenagers from Earth’s past and future to team up against a threat as vast as time itself. That sounds less like a dark ride and more like ITV’s Timeslip with a bigger catering budget.
The source material, for those who haven’t spent a sticky Florida afternoon in it, is a 15-minute slow trundle through the history of human communication inside EPCOT’s giant geodesic sphere. It has been open since 1982, and its narrators have included Vic Perrin, Walter Cronkite, Jeremy Irons and Judi Dench. The ride also has better genre credentials than you’d expect: Ray Bradbury helped design it and co-wrote its original storyline. That gives it a stronger science fiction pedigree than half the shows on any streaming service.
The theme-park-to-screen pipeline has had a mixed history. Pirates of the Caribbean printed money. Haunted Mansion has been made twice, and Jungle Cruise happened. If this goes to series, it would be the first Disney attraction turned into a full TV show, and the logical endpoint is a prestige drama about the queue for Space Mountain. “It’s a Small World” as an eight-part limited series seems only a matter of time.
Then again, the time-travel premise could work, and Waldron has form with timeline-bending at the TVA. It’s still only a pilot, so this may go no further than a pricey proof of concept. But Bradbury’s script promised visitors a journey into the future. He may not have pictured a future of streaming executives mining the rides for IP. Then again, he wrote “The Veldt”, so perhaps he did.
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