Europeans Warm Up To Mickey After Rocky Start, Disneyland Paris Has Overcome French Resistance

Once upon a time, in a faraway Paris suburb, a Magic Kingdom was born. The natives were aghast! Minnie and Mickey wouldn’t last, they cried!

But people came from far and wide, to stand in line for fantasy rides, and the little kingdom grew fast.

This modern-day success story has all the makings of a fairy tale, even the requisite happy ending. With its long lines, heftier profits and higher hotel occupancy rates, Disneyland Paris seems likely to live happily ever after.

Five years after it opened to French insults and widespread skepticism, the American-style theme park 18 miles east of Paris has surpassed the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre as the No. 1 tourist draw in France, even among the French.

Thanks to some 50 million visitors, Disneyland Paris will celebrate its fifth anniversary Saturday in the black, and expanding.

The park plans to celebrate its anniversary in high style, with an American-style parade down Main Street U.S.A., a new Disney show at Discovery Land’s Videopolis, a flower show unveiling a Pinocchio rosebush, and the inauguration of the Disney Promenade in Fantasia Gardens.

Recent statistics show the park brings in about 4 percent of the French tourism industry’s foreign currency earnings.

But it’s been an uphill battle. Some French snobs lashed out at what they called “the cultural Chernobyl.” The late President Francois Mitterrand said the park was “not my cup of tea.”

Financial analysts worried about European spending habits. Others said American-style family entertainment wouldn’t catch on in the Old World, and predicted one-time-only, no-return visits. Still others warned that Paris’ cool, rainy weather would drive would-be tourists to sunnier destinations.

“The concept of a Disney theme park in Europe has proven right,” said Philippe Ravenas, the park’s corporate communications director. “We still face huge financial challenges, but facts are facts. Disney magic crosses cultural and linguistic barriers.”

The naysayers were nearly right. Winter 1993 saw five theme hotels half-empty and a sixth shuttered. Rumors of the park’s imminent demise abounded, and attendance plunged. At one point the park was losing $1 million a day.

It teetered on the brink until 1995, when it posted its first year in the black, a full year ahead of original projections.

There was no magic in the park’s recovery. It took a complex restructuring of debts, cuts in ticket prices, attractive hotel-park packages, new rides like Space Mountain and tight cost controls.

Some 11.7 million people visited last year, a 9 percent increase over 1995 - and 33 percent more than 1994. Hotel occupancy rose to 72 percent for 1996, with a two-night average stay.

Countering predictions the French would turn their backs, figures show 40 percent of the visitors to Disneyland Paris are French, half of them from the Paris region.

Mickey and Minnie, it turns out, are pretty much universal. European children are weaned on animated Disney movies.

Twenty percent of the park’s visitors come from Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg; 15 percent are from Germany; and about 3 percent come from Italy and Spain.

Ravenas said European visitors like the VIP treatment they get from park employees and appreciate the rich details, elaborate costumes and quality of the attractions.

“Our mosaics are real mosaics. Our steam machines blow out real steam,” he said in a telephone interview.

Despite its all-American feel, the park has a continental touch. Swaggering pirates sing in French (and English) and Sleeping Beauty’s castle is adorned with Aubuisson tapestries, among Europe’s finest.

To date, the park’s biggest headache has been financing. To pay for the $4 billion project, the park’s holding company, EuroDisney, had hoped to develop property in acres of adjacent beet fields. But France’s real estate market collapsed in the early 1990s.

The company was rescued, in part, by an investment by Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, who now owns 23.6 percent of EuroDisney. Walt Disney Co. owns 39 percent, and individual investors and institutions like mutual funds hold the remaining stake.