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George Clooney, wife Amal and his co-stars came back to Disneyland for the first time in 20 years on Saturday to celebrate the upcoming release of his long-awaited movie, Tomorrowland! Amal even brought along her adorable niece, Mia, who looks just like her!
“It’s a lot of fun to premiere it here,” Clooney said as he paused on the long blue carpet at the AMC Downtown Disney 12. Most of the cast and creators of the anticipated film joined Clooney for a trip down the carpet, film screening and after-party inside a closed-down Tomorrowland.
Tomorrowland was created by Walt Disney as a section of Disneyland in 1955. It was a time when Americans imagined an optimistic future. Over the years, particularly in the 1970s, the public’s view of the future started to grow dark. This shift intrigued writer/producer Damon Lindelof, so when he began to synthesize the story for Tomorrowland, he looked for what Tomorrowland meant and how it could be represented in a storyline.
“I really wanted to recapture that earlier optimism,” comments Lindelof.
Then Lindelof heard about a box that had been discovered accidentally in a closet at the Disney Studios. The mystery box contained all sorts of fascinating models and blueprints, photographs and letters related to the inception of Tomorrowland and the 1964 World’s Fair. Lindelof was excited by the find and recalls,
“I began to imagine that the contents of the box were a guide to a secret story that nobody knew. But if so, what would that story be? And the most obvious answer to me was that there really was a place called Tomorrowland that was not a theme park but existed somewhere in the real world.”
This idea became the jumping-off point for the story of Tomorrowland, which Lindelof would later develop with director/producer Brad Bird and executive producer Jeff Jensen. Summing up what he wants audiences to take away from Tomorrowland director Brad Bird says,
“We hope audiences will be entertained but with luck we’ve also made something that will give them something to talk and think about later…maybe even start to imagine a different kind of future.”
The film stars Academy Award® winner George Clooney as former boy-genius Frank, jaded by disillusionment, and Britt Robertson is Casey, a bright, optimistic teen bursting with scientific curiosity, embark on a danger-filled mission to unearth the secrets of an enigmatic place somewhere in time and space known only as Tomorrowland What they must do there changes the world—and them—forever. The film also stars Hugh Laurie as brilliant scientist David Nix. Tomorrowland is produced by Damon Lindelof, Brad Bird and Jeffrey Chernov and directed by Brad Bird, with John Walker, Bernard Bellew, Jeff Jensen and Brigham Taylor serving as executive producers. Tomorrowland opens in theaters on May 22, 2015.
