Disney's hoping that it's been sitting on a goldmine.
Seeing as how This Is It exceeded expectations at the global box office and Michael Jackson is back to artistic-hero status after his image spent years in decline, the Mouse House is bringing the 3-D film Captain EO, starring Jackson as a thriller of an intergalactic commander, back into its theme park fold for a limited engagement in February.
The cutting-edge song-and-dance spectacle, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, produced by George Lucas and costarring Anjelica Huston as the Witch Queen, premiered at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., in 1986 and became a key attraction in Tomorrowlands around the world.
Alas, Disneyland grounded Captain EO in 1997 amid declining popularity, and all of its sister parks had removed the attraction by the following year.
Disney CEO Robert Iger said in September that there were no plans at the time to bring Captain EO back.
But $252 million later, there are.
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It seems like years since Michael Jackson died, but it only happened in June. See what else rocked our world (both positively and negatively) in our Best of 2009 section.