WEB SLINGERS: A Spider-Man Adventure
| WEB SLINGERS: A Spider-Man Adventure | |
|---|---|
| Park | Disney California Adventure |
| Land / area | Avengers Campus |
| Type | Interactive dark ride |
| Opened | June 4, 2021 |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering |
| Height req. | Any height |
| Status | Operating |
WEB SLINGERS: A Spider-Man Adventure is an interactive dark ride in Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure in the Disneyland Resort, California. Opened with the land on June 4, 2021, it allows riders to fire virtual webs from their hands, tracked by cameras rather than by any handheld device, in order to stop self-replicating Spider-Bots. It has no height requirement, making it the most broadly accessible of the park's newer attractions. Actor Tom Holland appears as Peter Parker in the preshow and ride film.
History
Avengers Campus had been announced as the park's Marvel land, replacing A Bug's Land, and was scheduled to open in 2020 with WEB SLINGERS as its new headline ride alongside the pre-existing Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout!. The park's extended closure during the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the land by nearly a year. When the resort reopened in spring 2021, Avengers Campus followed on June 4, 2021.
At opening, access was controlled by a virtual queue through the Disneyland app, and the standby line was not offered; both arrangements were later relaxed as demand settled, and the ride became a standard standby and Lightning Lane attraction. A near-identical version, Spider-Man W.E.B. Adventure, opened at Walt Disney Studios Park in Paris in 2022.
Experience
The setting is the Worldwide Engineering Brigade, or WEB, a workshop founded with Tony Stark's support to let young engineers develop technology for new heroes. Riders attend an open house at which Peter Parker demonstrates the WEB Slinger vehicle and his Spider-Bots, small robots designed to help Spider-Man. A fault causes the bots to replicate uncontrollably, and they escape into the campus.
In the preshow and briefing, Parker asks riders for help. Riders wear 3D glasses and board vehicles seating four on each side. During the ride, infrared cameras read arm and hand movements: extending an arm and flicking the wrist fires a web on screen. Webs can grab, move and blast Spider-Bots and objects, and different targets carry different scores, which are shown for each rider, each bench and each vehicle at the end. Physical sets merge into projected scenes set in the campus, the Pym test kitchen and the Collector's fortress.
Optional wrist accessories sold in the land add themed effects and abilities to a rider's webs, but none is required to ride or to score.
Design
The attraction belongs to the family of interactive dark rides that includes Toy Story Midway Mania!, but replaces that ride's pull-string cannons with gesture recognition, so that the action is performed with the rider's own arms. Vehicles rotate between scenes in the manner of an Omnimover-derived system, keeping throughput high despite the interactive elements.