Disney+ orders a Spaceship Earth series, and it’s nothing like the EPCOT ride

Disney+ ordered a pilot for a sci-fi series based on EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth, from IT: Welcome to Derry’s Jason Fuchs and Loki’s Michael Waldron. The catch: the ride is a gentle trip through communication history. The show is teens stopping an apocalypse.

Disney+ is turning Spaceship Earth into a TV show. Yes, the ride inside the big golf ball at EPCOT.

The streamer ordered a pilot Thursday for a sci-fi series based on the attraction, and it comes with a genuinely stacked creative team. Jason Fuchs, co-showrunner of HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry, will run it. Michael Waldron, the head writer on Marvel’s Loki and a co-writer on Avengers: Doomsday, is co-writing the pilot and producing.

Lee Toland Krieger, who directed episodes of You and Riverdale, directs the pilot. 20th Television produces. That’s real muscle for a project based on a slow-moving dark ride.

Then you read the plot, and things get weird.

The Spaceship Earth show has almost nothing to do with the ride

Here’s the official logline: “When a mission to avert an imminent global cataclysm goes awry, a small band of teenagers from Earth’s past and future must join forces to confront a threat as vast and mysterious as time itself.”

Teenagers. A global cataclysm. A threat across time. That is not the ride.

The actual Spaceship Earth is a 15-minute dark ride, narrated in recent years by Judi Dench, that carries you slowly up through the geodesic sphere past animatronic scenes about the history of human communication. Cave paintings, the printing press, the telephone, the internet. It’s calm, educational, and beloved for it. Nobody is fighting an apocalypse. The Phoenicians invent the alphabet and you feel nice about it.

So the show keeps the ride’s one sci-fi hook, the vehicles technically move you “through time,” and throws out basically everything else. EPCOT fans clocked the disconnect within about an hour of the announcement.

What the Spaceship Earth ride actually is

For anyone who’s never ridden it, the thing being adapted is the symbol of the whole park.

Spaceship Earth has been the centerpiece of EPCOT since the park opened in 1982, housed in the 180-foot geodesic sphere that shows up on every piece of EPCOT merch and every establishing shot. The ride inside traces how humans learned to share information, one breakthrough at a time, building toward the future.

It’s gentle, and that’s the point. It’s the ride you do first thing after walking through the gate, or the one you save for the end because the line’s short and the air conditioning is good.

Which is what makes a teens-versus-the-apocalypse adaptation such an odd fit. The source material’s whole personality is that it’s the opposite of a high-stakes thriller.

Disney keeps turning its rides into movies and shows

This is not a new instinct for Disney. Turning attractions into screen projects is a whole strategy, with a very wide range of results.

The high end is Pirates of the Caribbean, which spun a boat ride into a film franchise that’s grossed over $4.5 billion. The lower end includes Haunted Mansion (twice), Jungle Cruise, and a Country Bear Jamboree project. Disney has been mining its own parks for IP for two decades.

Spaceship Earth is the latest, and it fits a specific moment. Fresh off Disney’s earnings call this week, CEO Josh D’Amaro is pushing to make Disney+ the “digital centerpiece” of the company, and pilot orders like this are how a streamer fills a pipeline. A recognizable name that every Disney parks fan already knows doesn’t hurt.

What happens next with the Spaceship Earth pilot

For now, this is a pilot, not a series. That’s an important distinction.

Casting is underway, but a pilot order just means Disney is paying to make one episode and see if it works. Plenty of pilots never become shows. There’s no release timeline and no cast announced yet.

So the honest status is: interesting team, strange premise, one episode greenlit, everything else TBD. Whether a Judi Dench communications tour really needed to become a time-traveling teen apocalypse thriller is a question the pilot will have to answer.

At minimum, it’ll be the first time riding EPCOT’s calmest attraction could count as research for a doomsday show.

Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.

Pirates and Princesses is your destination for Disney news, theme park updates, and the pop culture you love. From Disney cruises and travel tips to Disney fashion, food, collectibles, and movie news, PNP covers it all. Visit us at piratesandprincesses.net for daily coverage. Follow PNP on Facebook and Instagram, and listen to the Pirates & Princesses podcast on Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

Hat Tips:

• Variety (August 6, 2026), the pilot order, the full creative team, the logline, and the Disney-ride-adaptation history

• Deadline (August 6, 2026), Fuchs and Waldron co-writing, the 20th Television and Anomaly Pictures details, and the 15-minute ride description

• The Hollywood Reporter (August 6, 2026), the Waldron Avengers: Doomsday credit and the Fuchs production-company background

• Laughing Place (August 6, 2026), the disconnect between the show’s premise and the actual ride, and the ties to Disney’s Disney+ earnings-call strategy

• WDW News Today (August 6, 2026), the EPCOT ride history and the geodesic-sphere context