Villainous Night, our opinion

I’d booked a place at Villainous Night on 29 September, because I thought the one in March was a great success on every level: treasure hunt, number of characters brought out and magical shows.

By Dom

Villainous Night, a late start

Well, the start time of the evening was already special, 9.45pm … hum hum. The day before, the park had closed at 7.30pm. And now, while a party was taking place in Disneyland, the park was closing later.

So when we arrived just before 9pm, we headed for a restaurant, as it was impossible to get into Central Plaza. The small number of restaurants open was very limited (4 possibilities and that’s it) which created interminable queues.

As a result, we missed the opening ceremony, just long enough to have dinner (a great name for a quick snack at Colonel Hathi’s).

Villainous Night, a lack of information

On our way out, we saw a photo booth on the terrace, but no indication of the time of day for any of the characters. In fact, the “programme booklet” provided was very brief… apart from the times of the shows and the opening and closing ceremonies, there was no indication of the time of day for any of the characters. We’ll learn from cast members that some characters don’t come out until 11pm.

We set off on our ‘quest’ for the stickers, because this time there was no hunt for clues or code words, no, no, nay, nay. Here we are, on our way to ‘collect’ stickers from cast-members in black jackets in the dark (that must have been the most complicated part), wearing Maléfique bonnets, whose locations we knew in advance from the guide (so it’s not even funny, you don’t have to do any research, just follow the queue of guests), to stick in the booklet provided. It felt like a return to childhood with the famous albums of vignettes, a little infantilizing the “game”. In fact, if you calculate the price of the ticket and the number of stickers to be collected, it comes to 2 euros and wheelbarrows for a piece of sticker paper, which is often badly cut, by the way.

Villainous Night, character encounters

Let’s move on to the characters. As in March, we knew there would be no close encounters, but there were fewer than in March. And especially for a ‘Villains’ evening, what a surprise to see : Miguel, Aladin, Louis , Naveen and so on… As for the villains, they were the traditional Halloween party ones, well ok, Hadés didn’t come out much, but there were a lot of people, and above all very powerful blue spotlights, not very wisely directed, so Hadés became all blue and complicated to take a photo of.

Villainous Night, the shows

Ah the shows, my God, what a disappointment, on the Château stage, here come Betty Rose and Jimmy Ocean again, uh what’s that got to do with the theme of the evening? Ah yes, they’re singers, so here’s Jimmy singing Ursula’s song “Poor unfortunate souls” with a few dancers in zombie pirate mode, bof, bof…

Off to Videopolis for the “Défilé de Cruella”, the show kicks off with a number from The Descendants. Then came Cruella, a dance number and the moment for the parade of contestants chosen from among the guests. The guests were seated in the front row and took their turn on stage. We did the last show. And frankly, the parade of chosen guests verged on being a parade of Drag Queen apprentices, but nowhere near the fabulous level of Drag Race. What’s more, they were obviously Instagrammers or similar and the dancers in the show were posing in ridiculous poses during the parade. I found it distressing.

Let’s talk about the closing, to make a long story short (it was very short anyway) Maleficent returned to Central Plaza to announce the start of the Halloween season and then a song and goodbye.

Villainous Night, the results?

The evening was more than disappointing, after the one in March which left all the participants with wonderful memories of success, conviviality and interactivity. This was boring, flat and of no interest. What’s more, I don’t mind Disneyland Paris trying to save money, but when it came to lighting, we were in mini-minimum mode. Thanks to mobile phones for being equipped with lights.

While the codeword race was great, collecting stickers like sheep is not very exciting.

As Disneyland Paris won’t be holding a Halloween party this year, we were hoping for a nice one for the Passes (to burnish their image LOL). But for this Halloween evening, we were sure of a low-cost, minimum-service experience.

And to top it all off, Disneyland Paris didn’t provide any shuttles to take guests back to the Resort’s hotels, even though the shuttles from the partner hotels were in service … What a blunder!

So all in all, a night to forget in a hurry until the next more successful one comes along… maybe!

But the results of Pass 2023 remain mixed.