Ronald D. Moore of For All Mankind and Battlestar Galactica has been tapped to spearhead a a weirdly enormous-sounding project for Disney, with The Hollywood Reporter saying that he’s putting together some kind of cinematic universe-style framing for a series of stories based on Disney’s Magic Kingdom. It sounds like the plan is to essentially reverse-engineer content based on characters from throughout the Disney theme parks rather than taking existing Disney characters or stories and finding places for them in the parks.
The first of Moore’s projects is The Society Of Explorers And Adventurers, and it will apparently revolve around characters like (hypothetically) “the sea boat captain from the Jungle Cruise or the prospector from Big Thunder Mountain or the climbers of the Matterhorn.” Those examples come from THR, not from Disney, so they might not be exactly what Moore is planning, but the story does note that there is a “seemingly endless number of characters and stories to explore” with something like this. After all, people are going to forget that the Disney parks exist if they aren’t constantly bombarded with advertisements for them—err, TV shows set in the fascinating Big Thunder Mountain universe that are not advertisements for Big Thunder Mountain.
Moore also signed a new deal with Disney’s 20th TV (formerly Fox) to develop multiple projects, included this Magic Kingdom stuff, and THR says he turned down a higher payout from Sony TV so he could take this Disney deal because he’s a huge Disneyland fan. Good for him, then, because this all sounds like a Disney-ass Disney thing. No word on when The Society Of Explorers And Adventurers (or any other Magic Kingdom Universe shows) will make it to Disney Plus, but this all sounds very early.