Can you feel the love tonight? Well if you can’t you may be out of luck (at least temporarily) if you are a love the Festival of the Lion King at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Rumor has it that the Festival may be going away at least temporarily.
According to some sources, whether reliable or not remains to be seen, the Festival of the Lion King is scheduled for a temporary shut down in January of 2013. The supposed plan is to make way for Pandora, the Avatar themed expansion.
If this is the case it will be a sad day for Grumpy. The Festival of the Lion King is one of the best shows at Walt Disney World. It is filled with music, acrobatics and drama. There is even a little crowd participation.
It may just be a rumor though! After all Disney went to a lot of trouble to enclose and air condition what used to be an open air theater. So we can hope that this rumor is completely false.
Of course Pandora itself is the source of a lot of rumors.
The rumors include where it will be situated in the Animal Kingdom. Speculation at first was Camp Minnie Mickey. This makes sense because Camp Minnie Mickey was an after thought when the Beastly Kingdom was cut because of budget overruns in the rest of the park.
Then a rumor involving Rafiki’s planet watch emerged. These rumors involved some permits issued for that particular area.
As of now, there is no official confirmation of where the land of Pandora will be.
The craziest rumor out there is that the entire expansion has been put on hold because of disagreements between James Cameron and Disney.
If the expansion goes on but Avatar is out it wouldn’t break my heart or a lot of others who were never enthused about Pandora. I was considerably let down when they announced the tie-in would be Avatar. Haven’t seen the whole movie. Have no desire to do so. There were so many better themes for a Disney park and the top choices in my book would not have required Disney to shell out so much money for a license.
And Grumpy is not alone in that disappointment.
So if this rumor is true, let’s hope it’s completely true and the closing is only temporary.
