Near Disney Lies An Abandoned Florida Resort That's Turning Into A Premier Shopping Hub

Anyone who's seen the Oscar-nominated movie "The Florida Project" will know that it's not all sunshine and rainbows when you're doing things outside Disney World. Nowhere is that more evident than in YouTube videos chronicling life at the abandoned Orlando Sun Resort and Convention Center, just before its demolition began in February 2026. This property is the future site of Ovation Orlando, a multi-million-dollar, mixed-use development that will bring dining, hotels, retail space, and nightlife spots to a new lakeside hub in Central Florida's theme park corridor. The 77-acre development is currently looking to "2028 and beyond" as it presents its vision of a thriving entertainment destination to potential partners. As recently as 2025, however, Realtor.com described the land it inhabits as "a playground for criminals and graffiti artists."

Built in the shadow of the Most Magical Place on Earth, the Orlando Sun Resort had been left in a state of considerable neglect, becoming littered with tires and overgrown with weeds since it shuttered in 2012. Squatters were living destitute in its gutted rooms, which occupied several clusters of two-story buildings, each arranged around a central swimming pool. At least one pool had turned into a scummy pond, full of floating mattresses and bed frames, while the convention center looked like an imploded dumpster. It was an ignominious end for a vacation property that first opened 40 years earlier as a Hyatt-branded resort, about two miles down the road from the then newly operational Disney World. 

The Ovation Orlando website envisions it "welcoming wanderers" to a "premier location" just a mile west of Disney World's main entrance, at the I-4 and US-192 interchange. On the other side of the highway, you'll find the unique resort town of Celebration, Florida, which began life as master-planned Disney community. Across the interstate, you'll find hotels like the Waldorf Astoria Orlando — one of the best Disney resorts for a magical vacation. Tourists headed for Disney's theme parks travel these same roads, and clearly, Ovation Orlando is hoping to intercept some of them.

Until now, many cars zooming by the Orlando Sun Resort may have done so without noticing it. It's not as if there were billboards calling attention to the old hotel, its history as Central Florida's largest resort, or the people taking shelter in its ruins. That's the other face of Florida: the one sought out by urban explorers, the one you don't see in Disney brochures. It's a past the neighboring city of Kissimmee (in Greater Orlando, where the Orlando Sun Resort was actually located) is paving over with a shopping and dining complex in the Disney Springs mold. 

In a video concept for Ovation Orlando, posted to Vimeo in 2024, the viewer soars in through an O-shaped fountain sculpture before hitting the Water's Edge, one of five planned zones. A Ferris wheel, a restaurant serving craft beer and artisanal pizza, and an oversized lollipop outside a candy store (or candy "experience") are among the features shown. There are also clubs and live music venues planned, along with a zone called the Indulgence with a "signature hotel" — one of three set to keep the resort tradition alive in the Orlando Sun's absence.

Driving down US-192, not far from Ovation Orlando's future home, eagle-eyed movie fans will spot a few filming locations from "The Florida Project." Eli's Orange World, which bills its shop as the "World's Largest Orange," is still there, as is the Jungle Falls Gift Shop, with its giant wizard head. Apart from garish tourist landmarks like these, the movie showed the harsh reality of people living in a budget motel outside Disney World. Until 2026, people squatting at the abandoned Orlando Sun Resort lived a similar reality.

The title of "The Florida Project" was a play on the idea of a housing project (where low-income families live) and Walt Disney's code name for Disney World back in the mid-1960s when it was under development. In 2022, real-life tenants at the Magic Castle Inn & Suites — the purple motel that served as the movie's setting — found themselves out on the street when the property was sold. It was hard not to think of that situation as the bulldozers moved in at the nearby Orlando Sun Resort, forcing people out of their makeshift homes. One evicted squatter told Flamingo Magazine, "Florida don't care about their residents. They care about their tourists."

Today, the former Magic Castle Inn is less recognizable as a Howard Johnson motel with a repainted exterior. Ovation Orlando will give the grounds of the Orlando Sun Resort an even more dramatic, upmarket makeover. It's a bid to beautify this corner of Kissimmee, where the Osceola Convention and Visitors Bureau promotes tourism and holds a trademark branding the city the "Vacation Home Capital of the World." Experience Kissimmee further encourages visitors to make it their "home base." When Ovation Orlando opens, the squalor of a deserted hotel that became a home for the unhoused in Kissimmee will just be a memory.