Monstropolis' Door Coaster Puts Up Its Two Lift Towers as Dark Avenue Trenches a New Fountain

By entgrove · September 15, 2026

Two vertical lift structures now stand at the Monsters, Inc. Door Coaster site at Disney's Hollywood Studios, with the M-shaped arches of the load station visible between them. Out front, scaffolding is coming off The Glob and going onto Harryhausen's, and crews are plumbing a new fountain where the Miss Piggy fountain stood. Dark Avenue opens in 2027; the coaster still has no date.

The Monsters, Inc. Door Coaster has stopped being a foundation and started being a building. Two tall steel structures now stand on opposite sides of the ride's central space at Disney's Hollywood Studios (the attraction's vertical lift systems), and between them the arched roofline of the load station has taken shape. Out front, the old Muppets Courtyard has been stripped back far enough that crews are plumbing a new fountain into the ground.

Two Lift Towers Now Stand Over the Door Coaster

Aerial photography shared on social media on September 5 gives the clearest look yet at the coaster's skeleton: supports across the footprint, a defined load area, and the two lighter-grey vertical structures that read as towers from the air. Those are the lift systems, and they are the single most useful progress marker on the site, because until they went up there was no way to judge the ride's vertical envelope from outside the walls.

Between the two towers sit two pairs of archways. Those arches are the ceiling of the load station, and they are the reason the aerials suddenly make sense: what looked like scattered steel a month ago now resolves into a room with a shape.

How the Door Coaster Will Load and Launch

Disney has already described the ride's opening sequence, and the construction now visible matches it. Guests board on the floor of the Monsters, Inc. Laugh Factory, at two side-by-side loading stations, each beneath one of those distinctive archways. Together the two arches form an M-shaped ceiling over the room, the M-shape now framed between the lift towers.

From there the suspended coaster is lifted more than 40 feet in about four seconds, carrying riders up toward that curved ceiling. Each seat rotates during the lift, turning from the sideways position you board in to face forward. At the top the train launches into the door vault, and much of the upper floor of that section is now enclosed. The multi-level layout of the enclosed portion is the other thing the aerials give away: there is a great deal of room in there for layering track.

The Biggest Show Building at Hollywood Studios

Scale is hard to read in an aerial close-up, and the door coaster's site reads smaller than it is. The show building is bigger than the one built for Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, which makes it the largest at Disney's Hollywood Studios and puts it among the largest anywhere at Walt Disney World, close to the box built for Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind at EPCOT.

It is also likely to be a more efficient building than Cosmic Rewind's. Cosmic Rewind is a combination of a retrofit into the old Universe of Energy building and a separate detached gravity building; the Monstropolis coaster is being built from nothing on former backstage land, so queue and pre-show space can be tucked underneath the track rather than bolted on beside it. Between the footprint and the vertical stacking, there is room here for a longer ride than early expectations suggested.

Dark Avenue Is Taking Over Muppets Courtyard

The other half of Monstropolis is the part guests can actually see, and it is a reimagining rather than an expansion. The front section replaces Muppets Courtyard, repurposing venues that already exist, and Imagineers have been calling the main thoroughfare Dark Avenue, though it is not clear whether that is an official name or an internal one.

What has changed on the ground this month:

• Scaffolding is coming off The Glob, revealing the new brickwork on the facade. The marquee has not gone up yet.
• Scaffolding has gone onto the facade of Harryhausen's, deeper in the land, along with the retail space next to it. That frontage was open as recently as last month.
• The Stage 1 Company Store has been demolished.
• Concrete columns marking the land's entrance have been rebuilt in a slightly different position after an earlier false start.
• Underground plumbing is going in for a central fountain, roughly where the Miss Piggy fountain used to sit.
• Walls line the Grand Avenue corridor on the walk toward Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, with work visible on the former MuppetVision 3D theater, PizzeRizzo and Mama Melrose facades.

The fountain is the detail worth pausing on. Retrofitting the existing Miss Piggy fountain would almost certainly have been cheaper and quicker than trenching new underground plumbing, so the decision to start over suggests either an infrastructure problem beneath the old one or a genuinely different water feature. Either way, a new fountain is a notable investment: water features have quietly become an endangered species across the parks over the last few decades.

What Opens in Dark Avenue

Disney has detailed the venues that make up the 2027 half of the land:

• Glob Theater: home to a new show, Welcome to Monstropolis, built around an original Randy Newman song of the same name. Mike and Sulley host: Sulley has put together a small, homespun production, and Mike, in Imagineers' telling, "has a few surprises up his sleeve that he thinks will bring down the house. Hopefully not literally." The show is a mixed-media production: Audio-Animatronics figures on drums and camera at the lower corners of the stage, with screens and other media used centre stage and along the upper sides.
• Harryhausen's Restaurant: the table-service venue taking over Mama Melrose, recreating the restaurant where Mike and Celia's date went badly wrong. Its centrepiece is a new Audio-Animatronics sushi chef whose many tentacles work the pass in view of the dining room. The menu will not be sushi alone.
• Archie's Scare Pig Pizza: the counter-service pizza place replacing PizzeRizzo, in the same footprint, themed around Fear Tech's six-legged mascot after years of being "borrowed" by Monsters University students.
• Monsters University Alumni Club: next door to Archie's, a walk-through of MU's clubs, fraternities and sororities, including the elite Scarer's Club honouring the school's legendary scarers.
• The Scareporium: the land's souvenir shop. Disney has not said where it sits, which matters: if it is attached to the door coaster building, it does not open in 2027.

Imagineers have also described the design approach for the land itself: pillars, horns and teeth worked into the architecture, but built as lived-in real-world places inspired by the films rather than direct recreations of the animated buildings. Some of those details are already visible from ground level through the scaffolding.

Walt Disney Imagineering has also shared a short clip on social media of a mock-up for Harryhausen's, showing the sushi chef figure being brought to life with a combination of classic animatronic technique and audio and visual media.

What Has a 2027 Date, and What Still Does Not

The split matters more than the headline progress. Dark Avenue opens in phases starting in 2027 (the theater, the two restaurants and the alumni club), and everything visible from inside the park is on that schedule. The Monsters, Inc. Door Coaster has no announced opening date at all, and the state of the site says plainly that it is not a 2027 attraction: the lift towers are up, but the building is not enclosed, the track is not in, and neither Harryhausen's nor the Glob Theater interior has been started in earnest.

The realistic read is a 2027 opening for the front half and a separate, later debut for the coaster. Watch two markers between now and then: the Glob Theater marquee going onto those mounting posts, and the door coaster building being closed in. Neither has happened yet.