Manifesto

There are roughly ten thousand places on the internet where you can read theme park news. Most of them will breathlessly inform you that a new cupcake has dropped at Magic Kingdom, accompany it with seventeen affiliate links, and call it journalism. We are not that.

Monorail News exists because the theme park and entertainment industry deserves better than the coverage it gets. Not more coverage — God knows there's plenty of that — but coverage that actually respects your intelligence. Coverage written by people who understand that a new coaster announcement is also a capital allocation story. That a streaming show's success has downstream implications for a theme park land on the other side of the country. That none of this stuff exists in a vacuum, even though almost everyone writes about it like it does.

We don't do access journalism. We're not going to kill a story because a PR team bought us lunch at a media event, and we're not going to pretend a mediocre attraction is revolutionary because we got to ride it two weeks before you did. If something is great, we'll tell you it's great and we'll tell you why. If something is a mess, you'll hear that too — and you'll hear it from people who actually understand what it takes to build these things, which means the criticism will be worth reading instead of just someone yelling into the void.

We also don't do outrage bait. The theme park internet has this exhausting tendency to either worship every corporate decision as the second coming or treat every price increase as a personal betrayal. Neither of those is analysis. Analysis is understanding that Dollywood putting on a race weekend isn't just a fun event — it's a regional park studying Disney's playbook and making a calculated bet on a national audience. Analysis is recognizing that a Galaxy's Edge timeline reset tells you something about how a company thinks about its own creative mistakes. That's the stuff we care about.

Here's what else you should know about us: we actually like this stuff. Not in the performative, brand-ambassador way where liking things is a professional obligation. We ride the rides. We play the games. We watch wait up at midnight for the newest episode of The Testaments to drop and have opinions about them that weren't pre-approved by a studio's communications department. When we tell you that a show just keeps on giving or that a filmmaker's long-term vision still has room to surprise, it's because we sat in the theater or on a couch and felt it, not because we're trying to maintain a relationship with a publicist.

We cover Disney, obviously — it's in the name, it's in the DNA, and frankly, it's impossible to talk about this industry without talking about the company that essentially invented it. But we also cover Universal, Herschend, United Parks and anyone else doing interesting work, because this industry is bigger than one company and the most interesting stories are often happening at the places nobody else is paying attention to.

We write with a point of view. You will not find "on the other hand" hedging here when we know which hand is right. We'll tell you when James Cameron made something astonishing and we'll tell you when a show ran three seasons past its expiration date. We'll give you the reporting and the receipts and let the work speak for itself.

Unparalleled Disney, theme park, and entertainment news and analysis. That's the tagline. We intend to earn it every time we publish.