Disney's new Lion King water ride will have a Splash Mountain-sized 52-foot drop
Disney shared new details on the first-ever Lion King land, under construction at Disney Adventure World in Paris. The log flume features a 52-foot drop, three waterfall slopes, and a 120-foot Pride Rock, with construction already underway.
Disney is building a Splash Mountain in Paris. It just isn’t calling it that.
At D23 on August 15, Disney shared new details on the first immersive land themed to The Lion King, now under construction at Disney Adventure World, the second gate at Disneyland Paris.
The headline attraction is a water ride, and the numbers are the interesting part.
The drop is almost exactly Splash Mountain’s
The new flume’s final drop measures 52 feet, or 16 meters.
Splash Mountain‘s signature drop was 52.5 feet. Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which replaced it at Magic Kingdom and Disneyland, kept the same one, since it reuses the original flume.
So Disney has designed a brand-new log flume whose defining moment lands within inches of the ride it retired in the States.
The difference is that this one is being built from nothing. Disneyland Paris never had Splash Mountain, so there’s no existing track to inherit. Every foot of it is new, which makes matching that drop a choice rather than a constraint.
Three slopes, one of them outdoors
Disney says the attraction features three slopes, which makes it a multi-drop flume rather than a single-plunge ride.
Reporting from earlier this year, when Disneyland Paris shared an update on the project, indicated that only one of those drops is outdoors, a decision made to account for Paris winters. That’s the sort of problem Florida and California flumes never have to solve. A soaking ride in January reads differently outside Orlando.
The same earlier reporting put the new land at roughly 7.4 acres, with Imagineers drawing on Tanzania for the environment, and Beth Clapperton serving as creative director.
Pride Rock is going up 120 feet
The land’s centerpiece is the ride building itself, shaped as Pride Rock and standing about 120 feet tall.
For scale, that puts it in the neighborhood of the Tower of Terror at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and well above Big Thunder Mountain. Guests will enter through caves beneath it before boarding.
Once inside, the ride retells Simba’s full arc from cub to king, moving through scenes from the 1994 film with its songs playing throughout, and building to Simba’s final confrontation with Scar. Disney confirmed Audio-Animatronics figures and special effects throughout.
Disney says it will be one of the largest attractions at the resort when it opens.
The park it’s being built in has a new name
If “Disney Adventure World” is unfamiliar, that’s fair.
It’s the park formerly known as Walt Disney Studios Park, rebranded as part of a years-long transformation of Disneyland Paris’s second gate. The renamed park debuted earlier this year, and the Lion King land is one of the largest pieces of what comes next.
Beyond the ride, the land will include dining, shopping, and character meets.
What Disney didn’t say
No name for the attraction. No opening date. No height requirement announced, which matters for a flume with a five-story drop.
Construction has started, which is more than several projects announced this weekend can claim. But the gap between “dirt is moving” and “you can ride it” on a project this size is usually measured in years.
Somewhere in France, workers are pouring the foundation for a fifty-two-foot drop that American parks used to have. Sometimes the reboot happens on another continent.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Disney Parks Blog (August 15, 2026), the D23 update, the 52-foot drop, the three slopes, the 120-foot Pride Rock, the Scar confrontation scene, and the construction status
Wikipedia (retrieved August 16, 2026), Splash Mountain’s and Tiana’s Bayou Adventure’s 52.5-foot drop measurements
MickeyVisit and Inside the Magic (March and April 2026), the earlier Disneyland Paris project update covering the single outdoor drop, the Tanzania inspiration, the land’s acreage, and the creative director