Bob Iger’s opening line in Disney Worldbuilders is blunt: “We studied different parts of the world that we could expand into.” The new documentary, now streaming on Disney+, pulls back the curtain on how Disney evaluated, selected, and began planning its next major theme park, to be built on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi.
The film’s primary value is operational. It places the site selection process on screen, featuring Iger alongside Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi; Mohamed Abdalla Al Zaabi, chief executive of Miral; and Tom Fitzgerald, senior creative executive at Walt Disney Imagineering. Together, they walk through the strategic and creative logic that made Abu Dhabi the chosen location.
Geography drove much of the initial calculus. “About one-third of the world’s population can get here within four hours,” Iger explains in the film, framing Abu Dhabi not as a regional destination but as a global access point. He calls it “an oasis of the world,” language that signals Disney’s intent to draw visitors from well beyond the Gulf.
The rationale, though, extends past logistics. Iger describes a deliberate assessment of cultural fit and long-term growth potential alongside operational feasibility. “We love what Abu Dhabi stands for, its potential and its dreams, its design ethic. It is a place that is only pointing to the future in so many different ways with great enthusiasm and tremendous optimism,” he states. That framing matters for delivery: a park built on a long-term partnership requires alignment on trajectory, not just on contracts.
Scale is a recurring theme in the planning sessions the documentary captures. Iger is direct about the ambition required. “You have to think big, you have to build big and then you have to build great.” He stresses that the development is not being assembled in stages or as a partial offering, but rather as something complete from the outset. “Setting out something that I feel people, when they look at it, will feel is a complete experience,” he says.
Meanwhile, Al Mubarak situates the project within Abu Dhabi’s broader investment in creative industries. “We’re investing significantly in the creative industries, because we believe in the creative mind. It’s so powerful. It’s what connects us,” he states. He identifies Disney’s intellectual properties, from Star Wars and Marvel to Pixar, as catalysts for local creative development, describing the park as something that will inspire “a brand-new generation of creative thinkers to create new worlds.”
Fitzgerald’s contribution addresses the harder operational question: how do you organize Disney’s vast narrative catalogue within a coherent physical space? His answer draws directly from Abu Dhabi’s own landscape. “We were impressed with the diversity of the biomes in Abu Dhabi and the story they create,” he explains, citing the Jubail Mangroves, Al Ain Oasis, desert landscapes, marine environments, and urban areas as the structural inspiration for the park’s thematic design. That grounding in local geography is also the mechanism for what Iger has previously described as a park that is “authentically Disney and distinctly Emirati.”
Fitzgerald frames placemaking as the discipline that ties storytelling to construction. “If you think of classic storytelling, ‘once upon a time’ is always followed by location. In a kingdom far away. In a galaxy far, far away. Placemaking is key to storytelling and it’s key to what we do. In Imagineering, we’re bringing these worlds to life in three dimensions,” he states. For a project of this scale, that principle functions as a design brief as much as a creative philosophy.
The park will include themed accommodation, retail, dining, and entertainment. The documentary offers limited detail on specific attractions or visitor experience sequencing, which means the gap between the creative framework on screen and the operational reality on Yas Island remains the central open question. Iger closes the film on the development site itself, describing the ambition plainly: “You have to have a wild imagination that can turn a barren piece of land into a magical place.”
Whether the execution matches that vision is the part the documentary does not yet cover.