The Great Movie Ride
| The Great Movie Ride | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Disney's Hollywood Studios | |
| Area | Hollywood Boulevard |
| Status | Operating |
| Cost | $78.45 |
| Soft opening date | June 17, 1984 |
| Opening date | May 1, 1989 |
| General statistics | |
| Attraction type | Dark ride |
| Designer | Walt Disney Imagineering |
| Theme | Motion picture history |
| Music | "Hooray for Hollywood" (load area only) |
| Length | 587 m (1,926 ft) |
| Vehicle type | Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) |
| Vehicles | 2 cars per ride vehicle |
| Riders per vehicle | 68 |
| Rows | 5 per car |
| Duration | 22 minutes |
| Audio-animatronics | 59 |
| Sponsor |
Turner Classic Movies (2015–) Coca-Cola (1989–98) |
| Hosted by | Robert Osborne (2015–) |
 FastPass+ available |
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 Wheelchair accessible |
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 Must transfer from wheelchair |
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 Assistive listening available |
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 Closed captioning available |
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The Great Movie Ride is a guided vehicle dark ride located in Disney's Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World. The attraction employs the use of Audio-Animatronic figures, live actors, special effects, and projections to recreate iconic scenes from twelve classic films throughout motion picture history. The attraction—which debuted with the park on May 1, 1989—is located inside a replica of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, one of Hollywood's most famous movie palaces.
The Great Movie Ride directly inspired the creation of Disney's Hollywood Studios. In a Walt Disney Imagineering book, it was revealed that The Great Movie Ride was actually going to be the main attraction in a show business themed pavilion at Epcot, which was to be called "Great Moments at the Movies." However, the newly assigned Disney CEO Michael Eisner and WDI president Marty Sklar decided the idea was strong enough to lead an entire new theme park. The idea for the ride was expanded, and the Disney-MGM Studios went into official development. Plans called for The Great Movie Ride to be the main attraction for the Disney-MGM Studios Paris theme park, which was scrapped due to the early financial difficulties of the Euro Disneyland Resort. Years later when the resort began turning profits, a show business themed theme park went into development again, and the Walt Disney Studios Park opened in 2002 at the Disneyland Resort Paris, although minus The Great Movie Ride. A show called CinéMagique was built in lieu of the ride due to claims by Disney management that the French preferred shows to ride-through attractions.
Three separate attempts have been made by Walt Disney Imagineering to bring The Great Movie Ride to California. First were plans to incorporate the attraction into the proposed “Disney-MGM Studio Backlot” project, a 40-acre (160,000 m2) film studio themed retail and entertainment district that was planned (but ultimately never built) for downtown Burbank, California during the late 1980s. Several years later, plans called for the ride to serve as the centerpiece of the proposed Hollywoodland at Disneyland, which would have been added to the park during the planned Disney Decade in the 1990s. Due to budget cuts, however, Hollywoodland was canceled. Later, plans called for the ride to be built as part of the Hollywood Pictures Backlot area of the Disney California Adventure Park theme park at the Disneyland Resort. But budget cuts in the park's original development planning forced the ride's projected cost to be spent on smaller, original and less expensive attractions.
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Wikipedia