The successful opening this week of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl means that, all across Hollywood, lights are switching to green for Disney ride-themed movies. In fact, we can already look forward to The Haunted Mansion, starring Eddie Murphy and scheduled for release in November.

But why stop there, when there are whole theme parks waiting to be turned into thinly plotted, pre-branded movies! Whereas development executives once had to plow through whole books -- or whole tedious five-page synopses of books -- for ideas, they can now simply stroll Main Street USA, and be bombarded with new material, while also enjoying a funnel cake.

Here, Fametracker provides an exclusive glimpse at five Disney rides-cum-blockbusters and/or cable TV series, now speeding through the development pipeline:

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad; Release date: November 2003

Young Barnaby Corn (Cole Hauser) has one goal -- to stop a big city land developer (Craig T. Nelson) from tearing up the mountain railroad that was laid down by Corn's great-grandfather's own hands. The land developer wants to build exclusive mountain condos for movie stars, but Barnaby -- a former Yale law student who escaped his small-town roots, only to return to take over his family homestead and start a pro bono law practice -- knows the mountain railroad is the only way to get medicine to remote backwoods towns. So when the mayor of Big Thunder (Ned Beatty) approaches Corn with a lucrative buyout, his answer is a curt "No thanks." It certainly doesn't ease the tension that Corn is engaged to Lula, the mayor's daughter (Mandy Moore). Little does Corn realize that his next visitor will be a wily, self-trained backwoods assassin, known locally as Hangnail (William Forsythe), who's coming with a much less appealing buy-out offer! When Corn is forced to take refuge in the woods of Big Thunder Mountain, the developers think they've won -- until Corn wages a one-man guerrilla campaign to thwart those who would threaten his railroad. Soon, it's the city slickers who are making tracks!

It's A Small World After All; Release date: February 2004

Kate Hudson stars as Ali McMiles, an ambitious young travel agent with a demanding boss (Tovah Feldshuh). When her boss remarks that homebody Ali simply isn't worldly enough to be a successful travel agent, McMiles responds by making an audacious bet -- that she'll visit the capital of every country in the world in just thirty days! But there's one thing Ali hasn't scheduled into her hectic trip: falling in love. So when she runs into Frank Avenue (Colin Farrell), an ambulance driver with Doctors Without Borders, at a café in Prague, she assumes that an espresso and a laugh are the only things they'll ever share. Imagine her surprise when she bumps into him again in Budapest -- and Amman, and Lhasa, and Monrovia! Is this just a happy coincidence -- or something more sinister? Is Compton stalking McMiles -- or protecting her?

Shrunken Ned's Junior Jungle Boats; Release date: April 2004

Jon Voight> stars as Shrunken Ned, an Amazon river guide who was miniaturized when an angry tribal leader (Edward James Olmos) felled him with a voodoo spell. Now Ned stands tall in the bow of his boat -- six inches tall, to be exact! But his diminutive stature doesn't stop him from running a successful Amazon tour company -- or from leading a brilliant young zoology professor (Gabrielle Union) and her bumbling graduate students (Dwight Yoakam, Steve Zahn) on a hunt for a lost jungle idol of great cultural importance. What these adventurers don't know is that the idol also holds the power to restore Shrunken Ned to his original height -- a treasure that, to him, is worth its weight in gold. This is one "idol pursuit" that Ned will stop at nothing to achieve! So will he lead his fellow adventurers to their goal -- or to their doom?

Space Mountain; Release date: Summer 2004

Amateur astronomer Bill "Cutty" Cuthbert (Billy Bob Thornton) has made a terrifying discovery: the Earth isn't inside a vast, empty vacuum at all, as previously believed. Instead, all of space, including the Earth, is contained within an enormous, hollow mountain. What's worse, this unimaginably large mountain is on the verge of a geological incident of cataclysmic proportions -- an avalanche that will happen inside the mountain, or, as Cutty explains it, a massive, space "invalanche." And in an invalanche, the "boulders" will be planets -- tumbling straight for Earth! Enter champion Aussie rock climber Piton Grabbers (Hugh Jackman), who reluctantly agrees to head up a crew of the world's most extreme rock climbers (Stephen Baldwin, Jennifer Garner, Orlando Jones), along with an uptight NASA hotshot pilot (Michael Vartan), inside an enormous, drill-shaped shuttle that will blast through the tumbling rocks -- or so Cutty's theory goes! And even if this ragtag crew can get the mission ready in time, they'll still need to win the approval of skeptical U.S. President Amanda Cain (Kelly Lynch) -- who may well have an agenda all her own.

Ariel's Grotto; Series premiere: September 2003

Costas Mandylor stars as Jericho Ariel in this tense but uplifting new series from the USA Network. Once the star cop on an unnamed city's vice squad, Ariel retired from the force after a prostitution kingpin by the name of Tyco (Colm Feore) ordered his army of scantily clad whore/hitwomen to wipe out Jericho's entire family. His spirit crushed, Ariel retreated to seclusion in his parents' old tenement in the unnamed city's poor inner-city district. Now he serves as the leader of a children's choir, consisting of underprivileged but talented youth with excellent voices. Cynical and scarred, Ariel's left the whole city to Tyco's rule and Tyco's lethal streetwalkers -- except a four-block-square area, known as Ariel's Grotto. Tyco doesn't own those streets! But Tyco's got a new plan -- to infect the city with an insidious STD known as "Slave," because it makes all who contract it susceptible to his orders. How long can Ariel and his comely and compassionate choir co-director Grace (Kim Delaney) keep Tyco's forces -- and his virus -- out of their self-created Eden? Especially now that the police chief (Will Patton) has slipped snugly into Tyco's pocket?