While touching it, the pin transports her to Tomorrowland. At the police station, she finds a pin in her belongings. Her father, Eddie, is a NASA engineer, but faces losing his job. In the present day, optimistic teenager Casey Newton repeatedly sabotages the planned demolition of a NASA launch site in Florida. Frank obeys and sneaks onto the ride, where the pin is scanned by a laser, and he is transported to Tomorrowland, a futuristic cityscape, where advanced robots fix his jetpack, allowing him to fly and join the secretive world. Frank is approached by a young girl, Athena, who hands him an orange lapel pin with a blue "T" embossed on it, telling him to follow her onto Walt Disney's " It's a Small World" attraction at the Fair's Pepsi-Cola Pavilion.
In 1964, a young boy named Frank Walker attends the 1964 New York World's Fair to sell his prototype jet pack, but is rejected, as it does not work. The film grossed $209 million and finished up being a commercial failure worldwide against a total production and marketing cost of $280 million, losing Disney $120–150 million, though these figures do not take into account revenue from home media, merchandising, and syndication. Upon its release, the film received mixed reviews from critics, who praised its original premise, performances, action sequences, visual effects, and themes, but felt that it lacked focus on the titular world and criticized the screenplay. Tomorrowland was released in conventional and IMAX formats by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures on May 22, 2015. Principal photography began in August 2013, with scenes shot at multiple locales in five countries.
In drafting their story, Bird and Lindelof took inspiration from the progressive cultural movements of the Space Age, as well as Walt Disney's optimistic philosophy of the future, notably his conceptual vision for the planned community known as EPCOT. Walt Disney Pictures originally announced the film in June 2011 under the working title 1952, and later retitled it to Tomorrowland, after the futuristic themed land found at Disney theme parks. In the film, a disillusioned genius inventor (Clooney) and a teenage science enthusiast (Robertson) embark to an intriguing alternate dimension known as "Tomorrowland," where their actions directly affect their own world. It stars George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy, Tim McGraw, Kathryn Hahn, and Keegan-Michael Key. Tomorrowland (also known as Project T in some regions and subtitled A World Beyond in some other regions) is a 2015 American science fiction film directed by Brad Bird, with a screenplay by Bird and Damon Lindelof, based on a story by Bird, Lindelof, and Jeff Jensen.