Could Sesame Street Leave United Parks for Disney or Universal?

For 45 years, the theme park rights in the United States for Sesame Street have belonged to United Parks & Resorts. Sesame Place Philadelphia opened in 1980. It was the first theme park built entirely around the show. Over the following four decades, United Parks & Resorts spread Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster, and the rest of the gang across nearly every property it owns. That includes Busch Gardens Tampa, Busch Gardens Williamsburg, SeaWorld Orlando, SeaWorld San Antonio, and a second Sesame Place in San Diego.

That relationship may be ending. Between the new Muppet performance-capture technology that debuted with Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster Starring The Muppets and the possibility of Sesame Street becoming available to theme parks again, my armchair Imagineering neurons started firing once more.

As always, a reminder: I have zero inside knowledge here. No sources, no leaked plans, nothing. I’m just working through a genuinely tangled rights history, a lawsuit that could blow up a 45-year partnership, and a brand-new piece of Imagineering tech. Treat everything below as informed daydreaming. Regardless, let’s dive in, with a bit more legal background than is typical!

So what’s actually going on with the lawsuit?

In March 2026, Sesame Workshop sued United Parks & Resorts in federal court in New York, asking a judge to terminate the companies’ 2017 licensing agreement entirely – not simply order payment of the money it says it is owed.

This is not their first dispute over unpaid royalties. After a separate 2024 case, a federal judge ordered United Parks to pay $11.4 million. Sesame Workshop says the company eventually paid, albeit late, before it stopped making payments again.

The suit also accuses United Parks of retaliation after that ruling. It points to a few things. Sesame Place San Diego abruptly shifted to seasonal operations without warning. A promised third Sesame Place park got shelved, and Sesame branding showed up in marketing materials without approval.

United Parks has only said it looks forward to making its case in court. Reportedly, it’s countering that Sesame Workshop failed to hold up its end by letting the show’s HBO Max deal lapse.

Whatever the legal merits, the practical stakes are enormous. United Parks owns two Sesame Place parks. It also runs smaller Sesame-themed lands at SeaWorld and Busch Gardens parks. If Sesame Workshop wins the right to terminate, all of that theming goes homeless overnight. And that’s the part that got me thinking about who might actually want it.

Wait, didn’t Disney almost get Sesame Street already?

This is where it gets interesting for Disney fans, because Sesame Street and the Muppets share a genuinely tangled ownership history.

Jim Henson built both properties. For most of Sesame Street’s early run, the Henson Company itself owned the Sesame Street characters. Children’s Television Workshop, now Sesame Workshop, only produced and aired the show.

Jim Henson began negotiating the sale of his company to Disney back in 1989. The Sesame Street characters were reportedly one of the sticking points. Then Disney CEO Michael Eisner wanted them included; Henson resisted giving up total control. Henson’s unexpected death in 1990 collapsed the deal entirely.

The Henson Company changed hands twice more over the following decade, and the German conglomerate EM.TV bought it in 2000 for roughly $680 million. EM.TV’s stock then collapsed, and the Henson family bought the company back in 2003 for a fraction of that price. Somewhere in that shuffle, Sesame Workshop bought the Sesame Street characters outright. That permanently separated them from the rest of the Henson catalog.

So when Disney finally closed its acquisition of the Muppets in February 2004, Sesame Street had already left the building. Disney got Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, Animal, and the Muppet film and TV library. Sesame Workshop kept Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster, Oscar, and the rest of the Street. The Henson family held onto Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth. Same creative DNA, three separate rights holders, and honestly, kind of a shame. But maybe it’s possible that a reunion of Henson properties could occur and rectify this split.

Could Disney really finally get the rights to the Sesame Street gang? Legally, nothing stops it. Sesame Workshop is a nonprofit looking for a better licensing partner, not necessarily an exit from theme parks. Disney fits that bill: global reach, existing kids’-entertainment infrastructure, and brand-new puppet-animatronic tech tailor-made for a property like this.

Universal is a real contender too, and it already has a stronger head start on adjacent kids’ IP than people give it credit for. It also doesn’t carry the “we already have our own preschool characters” baggage Disney has with Disney Junior and Disney Channel properties, which gives Sesame Street a cleaner path in. Anything is possible if the rights are back up for grabs!

The tech that makes this more than wishful thinking

Here’s the part that actually got me excited, and it has nothing to do with the lawsuit (thank goodness!).

Disney reopened Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster as Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring The Muppets on May 26, 2026. The pre-show introduced the first-ever audio-animatronic version of Scooter, the Electric Mayhem’s band manager. What makes that figure notable isn’t just that it exists; it’s how Imagineering built it. This marked the first time Imagineering used motion capture to develop a Muppet animatronic.

The process was truly innovative. Instead of hand-programming servo movements from video reference, Imagineers built a miniature motion-capture suit sized for a Muppet. Scooter’s longtime performer, David Rudman, physically puppeteered the character through the entire pre-show sequence. Sensors tracked every motion: the flailing arms, the bowed shoulders, the specific comic timing only a longtime performer brings.

That captured data drove the animatronic’s programming directly. It reportedly matches Rudman’s performance to within millimeters. Scooter’s arm even moves on an external rod, the same way a live puppeteer would work the character. The figure doesn’t just move like Scooter. It moves like a puppet being performed. For a Muppet, that’s exactly right.

That tech turns “Disney could theoretically do something with Sesame Street” into something with real teeth. Imagineering can motion-capture a puppet’s specific performance style. It can reproduce that style with animatronic fidelity. That pipeline transfers pretty directly to Elmo, Grover, Cookie Monster, or Oscar. These characters live or die on decades of specific, performer-driven physical comedy, exactly the thing a generic animatronic flattens out.

Could there be a hybrid show right next to Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster?

Here’s a Disney-specific idea I think is perhaps the most plausible, at least as a first move: a live show in Sunset Showcase. That’s the theater immediately next to Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, and it currently houses Disney Villains: Unfairly Ever After.

That venue turns over fast. It opened in 2015 with Club Villain, became Lightning McQueen’s Racing Academy in 2019, then got a full renovation in 2025 for the current Villains show. Magic Kingdom’s Villains Land is already in development, so I’d bet Unfairly Ever After is a placeholder. Once a dedicated villains land exists elsewhere on property, Sunset Showcase’s villains-themed run hits a natural expiration date, and Disney will need something new for the space.

So what might that show look like? Every puppet character, on both sides of a Sesame/Muppet crossover, would be an animatronic figure built off a captured puppeteer performance, the same way Imagineers built Scooter. Nobody works a rod or hand puppet live onstage.

That’s what lets the two casts share blocking and timing without coordinating two full puppetry teams in real time. Elmo, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, and Grover would cover the Sesame side. Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, and Gonzo would cover the Muppets side.

Humans would come in on the Sesame side, and honestly, that’s true to the source material. Sesame Street has always paired its puppets with human neighborhood regulars, in the vein of Gordon, Susan, Alan, or Chris. Real actors playing those roles onstage matches exactly how the show works on TV.

I’d also add one human on the Muppet side. That plays off The Muppet Show’s old format of a rotating celebrity guest star getting pulled into the chaos. That single “special guest” actor gives you a built-in reason for a human to stand next to Kermit. It also avoids breaking the illusion that the classic Muppets perform themselves.

Projection ties it all together, the same way Disney uses it in the Villain show already in the theatre. It could visually bridge Sesame Street and the Muppet Theater, as if they sit just down the block from each other.

The premise writes itself: the Muppets stage a show at their theater, and half of Sesame Street shows up because Elmo heard Kermit was performing next door. Chaos, a shared musical number, and a happy ending where everybody agrees the neighborhood’s got room for both. It’s the theme-park equivalent of the real crossover specials Sesame Street and the Muppets have done together over the decades, just staged live with Imagineering’s newest animatronic tech.

I like this idea because it sidesteps a lot of the licensing complexity a completely new land would require. A single theater production costs a lot less than retheming acreage, which makes it a realistic “first date” between Disney and Sesame Workshop if a deal ever happens. Low capital risk, high nostalgia payoff, and it already sits on prime real estate that just lost its Muppets anchor.

What if Disney went bigger and built an actual land?

Everything above is really just one show in one existing theater. If Disney wanted to build a genuine Sesame Street land, I’ve got a starting point in mind: the newly reimagined Walt Disney Studios courtyard.

Disney just rebuilt that whole corner of the park around exactly the audience Sesame Street serves. The reopened courtyard leans into shaded, park-like open space and characters. It’s also getting the “Off the Page” meet-and-greet zone inside the new Magic of Disney Animation building, plus an indoor playground aimed squarely at little kids. That’s already the tonal register a Sesame Street presence would need.

There is a lot of space behind this new courtyard that has been speculated about for years. It would require some work, but a Sesame Street expansion pad tucked behind the animation building could give Disney a real place to build the famous Street for all to visit.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to: that expansion pad behind the Walt Disney Studios Courtyard could then connect directly to the new Muppet Courtyard at Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster! That means you’d move from the park-like setting of the Walt Disney Studios Courtyard, to the buildings and attractions of Sesame Street, to the Muppet Courtyard. Frankly, it’s a great progression that mirrors growing up – Disney Junior to Sesame Street, to the Muppets. And it finally eliminates the dead-end nature of both Sunset Boulevard and the Walt Disney Studios Courtyard!

If that connection ever happened, you’d get a genuinely satisfying flow, with guests wandering the animation courtyard before drifting into a Sesame Street pocket behind it. They’d then pop out right at the foot of Sunset Boulevard’s Muppets corner. That ties the whole Henson family tree, Sesame Street and the classic Muppets both, into one walkable stretch of the park.

As for the attraction itself, I’d keep it modest rather than trying to out-thrill anything nearby. A short, gentle dark ride using the same mocap animatronic pipeline as Scooter feels like the right scale. It could carry guests past 123 Sesame Street and Hooper’s Store on an adventure with our Sesame Street gang.

Add dedicated meet-and-greets built as little street-corner sets, so Big Bird or Elmo can pose somewhere that actually looks like the show. Throw in a Cookie Monster quick-service spot slinging exactly the snacks you’d expect. None of it needs to be a headliner. It just needs to complete a corner of the park already being rebuilt for young families, and give them somewhere to land between Walt Disney Studios and the Muppets.

Or what if Universal swoops in instead?

Here’s the flip side of all that Disney daydreaming: what if Sesame Workshop skips Disney entirely, and Universal signs the deal instead?

There’s a real case for it. Universal doesn’t carry any of Disney’s historical baggage here. No tangled 1989 near-miss, no “we already got the classic Muppets and Sesame Street slipped away” backstory to work around. It’s a clean slate. Universal has also shown it will move fast and commit real capital to family IP when it wants to; just look at Isle of Berk in Epic Universe and DreamWorks in Universal Studios Florida. Not to mention that Universal actually already owns the theme park rights to Sesame Steeet in Japan – where though Sesame Street Fun World within Universal Studios Japan recently closed, Sesame Street characters still exist in various shows and as meet and greet characters in the park. This means that Universal already has ideas for the property on the books. If Sesame Workshop wants a partner who’ll commit to a real standalone land, rather than a show in an existing theater, Universal beating Disney to the punch seems plausible.

If that happened, I keep landing on the same spot: Universal Studios Florida’s Simpsons area. The Simpsons license for Universal ends soon, and with Disney now owning the rights to the long-running show, keeping the theme park rights could be very complicated for Universal. The current Simpsons area is also very close to DreamWorks Land, E.T. Adventure, and Animal Actors on Location, all areas that already attract a younger, less thrill-seeking clientele.

Slotting a Sesame Street presence alongside these areas with a retheme of Springfield to Sesame Street would give Universal a genuine multi-generational kids’ anchor that builds on the DreamWorks area and Minions Land.

It also provides a great answer to what happens next to the Springfield area of the park. It’s already a city street – updating the facade theming to Sesame Street buildings seems simple enough – Moe’s Tavern becomes Cookie Monster and Gonger’s Foodie Truck restaurant, for example. The gift shop becomes Hooper’s store. Throw in a few spaces for meet-and-greets like Big Bird’s bedroom alley and Elmo’s room, and you’ve got a whole land going!

The attraction I see replacing the Simpsons ride is again a slow-moving trackless or omnimover system carrying guests through various scenes and buildings along Sesame Street. It could stop at 123 Sesame Street, Hooper’s Store, and the courtyard. Motion-capture-driven animatronics of the core cast would react to guests, the way the Scooter figure reacts to riders in its pre-show. Hooper’s store could anchor a nostalgic beat for the parents in the vehicle. The ride content itself stays squarely aimed at preschoolers and their parents, the exact audience Sesame Place has always served.

And lest we forget, Universal Kids Resort just opened in Frisco, Texas. Sesame Street would be a perfect preschool addition to that park, which tends to skew a bit older with the Jurassic World, SpongeBob, and Shrek properties. A Sesame Street land would give preschoolers another place to call their own, as well as a more generational property for their parents and grandparents to enjoy as well. One of the expansion pads around the Jurassic World Adventure Camp would be perfect, and a Sesame Street dark ride would be a VERY welcome addition to this sun-drenched, almost entirely outdoor park!

One wrinkle, though: Universal would need its own version of that mocap-animatronic pipeline, which right now belongs to Disney Imagineering, not Universal Creative. That’s not a dealbreaker; Universal’s animatronic work at Epic Universe already stands on its own. But it’s a reminder that Disney does have a tech edge when it comes to bringing these puppeted characters to life, at least for now.

Just not sure how to get to Sesame Street yet

A lawsuit could genuinely strip Sesame branding from a dozen parks, and history nearly sent Sesame Street to Disney thirty-five years ago. And a brand-new motion-capture pipeline now exists specifically for translating puppet performance into animatronic form. Those pieces sit on the table in a way they haven’t before. Somebody just has to decide to play.

I hope you enjoyed this run through the speculative Sesame Street alleys with me. I’ll certainly be watching to see where this one goes next. Hope you’ll join me again soon for more blue sky dreaming!

Read more: Epic Universe Dark Universe Expansion: What Could Universal Build Next?