Battlestar Galactica and For All Mankind creator Ronald D. Moore recently left Sony Pictures Television for an overall deal with Disney, and right out of the gate, he’s lined up one of his next projects: developing a Magic Kingdom television franchise for the company’s streaming service, Disney+.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Moore’s project will be set in Disney’s Magic Kingdom, in a world where all of the various components of Disney’s parks actually exist side by side. The first project will be called The Society of Explorers and Adventurers. THR notes that if this first project is successful, “Moore will build out the Magic Kingdom universe and oversee the entire franchise.”
The report outlines a couple of examples of what to expect—shows that will utilize some of the background characters seen in the parks, building them out into a much larger, interconnected television franchise, much like what Disney’s done with some of its other properties, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or Star Wars, which features numerous stories all interconnecting within the same world.
The idea isn’t unheard of: the studio has relied on its parks for a number of projects in the past, such as the Pirates of the Caribbean films, Tomorrowland, Jungle Cruise, The Haunted Mansion, and others. The studio also has titles such as the ABC series Once Upon a Time, and Wreck-it Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet, which features characters from a bunch of different Disney properties coming together and interacting.
The project isn’t the first that Moore has under his belt with Disney: the studio announced that he’s also working on a Swiss Family Robinson series with Jon M. Chu (who recently stepped down from Disney+’s Willow series, and is also working on a Wicked adaptation). Moore also worked on George Lucas’s aborted Star Wars TV series, and now that he’s at Disney, he didn’t rule out the possibility of returning to the franchise at some point—although he noted that there are a bunch of projects in the works already, and that he wasn’t sure “this is the moment you go in and pitch a new Star Wars series over there.” Given that he’s doing some work with the Disney parks, it seems like it would be an easy hop, skip, and jump from that to a series about Galaxy’s Edge.
