Theme park has debt burden and has lost money almost every year since gates opened in 1992

Mickey Mouse is in trouble again. Despite welcoming more than 275 million visitors through its wrought iron gates since 1992, Disneyland Paris has been forced to ask for a €1bn (£785m) emergency rescue to save the Magic Kingdom.

Disneyland Paris has struggled under a mountain of debt and lost money almost every year since the gates first swung open. Now its main backer, the Walt Disney company, is stepping in to save the park’s parent business, Euro Disney.

Euro Disney’s finance director, Mark Stead, said the company’s €1.75bn debt burden had become so overwhelming it could not afford to keep the park looking sharp and fresh, let alone invest in blockbuster rides to compete against the theme parks of Florida.

Visitors asked to pay £59 per adult and £54 a child have noticed the lack of investment. The theme park, which was dubbed a “cultural Chernobyl” when it opened 22 years ago, is haemorrhaging visitors. It drew in 14.1 million over the past 12 months, a drop of 800,000 on the previous year and 1.5 million lower than 2012.

“We need to get away from tired-looking assets and make them look new,” Stead said. “We need to be ready for the 25th anniversary in 2017.”

He said the park would bring in more Disney characters and trademarks, although new blockbuster rides were unlikely. Its latest €150m attraction, Ratatouille: The Adventure, which is based on the 2007 film about a rat who dreams of becoming a top chef, opened in July to less than rave reviews.

Stead said: “We will be revamping attractions, bringing in new ride technology [and] new ride experiences. The look and feel will completely change. We hope to take technology from US parks and bring it here. We wanted to [do that in the past] and we needed to do that, but we haven’t had the financial flexibility to do so.”

Walt Disney owns 40% of the business. In its third multimillion-euro bailout of its French offspring, the US company is injecting €400m into Euro Disney and swapping €600m of debt into shares. The US company will also give Euro Disney breathing space on the rest of the loans until 2024.

If other Euro Disney shareholders decide not to back the emergency rights issue, Walt Disney is committed to taking back control of the whole company. Euro Disney’s second-biggest shareholder, Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud, who owns 10%, has yet to decide whether to back the rescue.

While visitor numbers are down, the park still pulls in more people than the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower combined, making it Europe’s biggest tourist attraction. But experts believe that to start making money it needs to draw in at least 15 million people a year. The park last turned a profit in 2008 and expects to lose €110m to €120m this year.

While admitting he needs to do more to attract visitors in an increasingly competitive market, Stead blamed most of the decline in visitor numbers on Europe’s bedraggled economies, with five out of the company’s seven key markets in recession. Just over half of Disneyland Paris’s visitors are French, followed by the UK (14%), Spain (8%), the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg (6%), and Italy and Germany (3%).

Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, who ran Euro Disney until the late 1990s before being poached to save the reputation of the Millennium Dome, said on Monday that the park’s management had “fallen asleep at the wheel” and failed to keep up with technical innovations and consumers’ diverging interests.

“They’ve been running that place since we left pretty much on autopilot. You walk around and it hasn’t been maintained properly, it looks outdated and tatty. It needs a proper shakeup both in leadership and strategy,” he said.

“The customers are more sophisticated, more focused on how to spend their money and their time and [management] haven’t kept up with that. Every other service business has reinvented itself to attract more customers. That theme park hasn’t.”

Gerbeau said Euro Disney, which consists of two neighbouring parks Disneyland Paris and Walt Disney Studios Park, doesn’t attract enough visitors to make it profitable. “They need 15 million visitors a year minimum,” he said. “They have not progressed they have regressed. I would be saying ‘what the hell are we doing?’”

“If you look at how aggressive Florida [theme parks] have become. It is almost costs less to jump on a plane to Florida than go to Paris.”

Disney has struggled to win over the French from the outset. When Michael Eisner, Disney’s former CEO, launched the company on the Paris stock exchange he was greeted by protesters waving “Mickey, Go Home!” placards and pelted with eggs.

On its opening day on 12 April 1992 motorists were warned of massive tailbacks near the park, then called Euro Disney, in Marne-la-Vallée about 18 miles east of Paris. The French government reckoned that up to half a million people were planning a visit on the big day. In the event only about 25,000 people turned up.

In perhaps its biggest misunderstanding of the French, they initially banned the sale of wine even though champagne vineyards are nearby.