I think about the issue of IPs becoming dated a lot when I look at Universal Orlando vs. Disney World. UO actually had a period of removing IPs from attractions for exactly that reason (who here has actually seen Earthquake?), while Disney has gone whole hog on adding more and more of them over time. I think Disney's ability to continue to use older IPs stems from the long history of how Disney has handled those IPs over multiple decades. Seven Dwarfs Mine Train certainly isn't suffering for popularity despite being based on a movie from 1937! But up until the 1990s, Disney's animated movies saw regular theatrical rereleases. I saw (and was terrified by) the final theatrical rerelease of Snow White when I was a kid. Where other studios focused on immediate profit by licensing films to be shown on television as soon as that technology emerged, Disney used its vault program to generate artificial scarcity for multiple decades--you'd only see a Disney movie when it popped back up in theaters once or twice per decade. Then of course home video made that model much less effective (though they continued it by limiting frequency of releases on VHS) and now of course they've ended the vault program in order to make Disney Plus as full and attractive a streaming library as possible.
The question is whether the movies being released now will have the same staying power without the vault system to systematically remind future viewers of their existence--whether more open-ended streaming access will keep those newer films (and at this point the older ones as well) alive in people's minds or not. My personal theory is that the live action remakes are partly to bring attention back to those IPs beyond the effort to make them profitable in and of themselves--some of us may have refused to see the new Lion King, but the ads sure did make me nostalgic for the 1990s version.
I think, too, about the question of whether we need to care about an IP to enjoy its associated theme park attractions. I only saw Avatar once when it first came out and didn't like it (I'm going to give it another try before my upcoming trip, not going in with any particular expectations), but I really enjoy the World of Pandora at Animal Kingdom. And then--Splash Mountain is a perennial favorite despite Disney having clamped down on its IP source material and done its best to pretend that Song of the South doesn't exist. And I personally have a fondness for Donald, Jose, and Panchito, but I'd wager most of the guests riding Gran Fiesta Tour have never seen The Three Caballeros or Saludos Amigos--and while that ride isn't a blockbuster, it does get riders. But I think what those examples have in their favor is that they work as self-contained stories and are compelling even if you aren't familiar with their IPs.
But I look at Frozen Ever After, and I think it's a misstep in the long term--not because of its placement (though I still would rather the focus in World Showcase was on real places) but because it's basically just a greatest hits compilation from the movie. The story is pretty thin, and its appeal is based mostly on feeling like you've stepped into the movie. That may be enough in the coming decades if the current generations enjoying it introduce their kids to it (and it still has appeal for those kids), but my wish was that it had had more of an original story to drive the action and provide something more meaty beyond rehashing the top songs. But I could be wrong; it could sustain its popularity for years to come, even when Frozen is no longer the new hit thing.
