Following the huge success of the Disney-MGM Studios theme park in Florida, opened on 1st May 1989, The Walt Disney Company announces that the second gate of the European resort will share a similar movie-making theme and even a similar name: Disney-MGM Studios Europe. Combining a theme park with backstage tours and vast real production facilities and soundstages, the park is due to open as early as 1996. As expectations for the Euro Disney Resort grow, this date is later brought forward even further — for a 1995 opening!
Nevertheless, the resort’s financial difficulties in 1993/4 would see the second gate plans completely cancelled. They were revisited following several years of financial success in 1999, with the announcement of the Disney Studios Paris project, a scaled-back second gate without the real production facilities. The second gate eventually opens to the public as Walt Disney Studios Park on 16th March 2002, the deadline year for a second park to open as stated in The Walt Disney Company’s original Main Agreement with the French government.
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