It's finally here. After years of rumors, an announcement, delays, cancellation, and rebirth, Universal Orlando will open its Epic Universe theme park officially this week.
I will be in Orlando for Universal's press event this week, which takes over the park on Tuesday and Wednesday. Subscribe to Theme Park Insider's RSS feed to be notified as soon as I post new content on the front page of the site. Right now, I am planning in-depth, spoiler-filled reviews of each of Epic's four IP-themed lands: Super Nintendo World, Dark Universe, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter - Ministry of Magic, and How to Train Your Dragon - Isle of Berk.
If you want relatively spoiler-free reviews of the park and its attractions, please see my initial review from Epic's press preview last month: Robert's first review of Universal Orlando's Epic Universe.
With Epic's official opening this week, fans and people in the industry will begin to get answers to some of the questions many of us have been asking about Universal Epic Universe.
It's been a long time since a major theme park has opened in the United States. The last park on the TEA/AECOM Theme Index attendance report's top 20 parks for North America to open was Disney California Adventure - 24 years ago, in 2001. Many of the people covering theme parks online now are not old enough to remember DCA's first few years. Heck, many theme park content creators weren't born yet when California Adventure opened.
So many people following Epic Universe's opening will not know that major theme parks typically have rough operations for their first year - especially parks that are trying to push the abilities of theme park technology, as Epic Universe is. That is why some Theme Park Insider readers - in our front page votes and on the Discussion Forum - have said that they are waiting to visit Epic until next year.
The roughest uptime at Epic has been for Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry, which did not open for team member previews before the press preview last month. After then, it has opened inconsistently during the park's public soft opening. Universal has tried its Virtual Line system for the ride, then opted for a traditional stand-by queue to accommodate guests who want to experience what I say is Universal's best Harry Potter ride yet... when it is working, of course. I cannot imagine that Universal will find a real-life magic wand that will wave away Ministry's technical challenges when the Epic Universe opens officially on Thursday, May 22.
Universal also has been limiting attendance in the park during its preview periods. Those admitted crowd levels will begin to rise during official operation. How will complex rides that have been doing relatively well in limited operations, such as Monsters Unchained - perform under the stress of thousands more visitors wanting to ride each day?
Universal has spent billions of dollars to design and build Epic Universe. It obtained a new plot of land, near the Orange County Convention Center, for the park, three hotels, and planned expansions. As much as the people at Universal Creative and the parks love to entertain fans, the bosses at Comcast did not green light this project just so that we all could have a good time at a new park. Comcast expects Epic Universe and its related developments to make the company money.
A lot of money.
Comcast and Universal Destinations & Experiences executives have been at this long enough to know that Epic will need time to reach maximum profitability. They understand that many of the most informed (and lucrative) theme fans will wait to see how the park is doing before committing to vacations there. But the answer to our first question - is Epic Universe ready for prime time? - will go a long way to determining how long Comcast will have to wait to get the answer it wants to our second.
Everyone in the theme park business is saying the same thing in news stories: Epic Universe will help us, by bringing more people to Orlando and to theme parks. But privately, theme park managers are preparing for attendance hits as fans choose Epic over other alternatives, in Orlando and around the country.
Ultimately, Epic Universe will help good theme parks, as this new standard in theme park entertainment increases public appetite for great theme park attractions. But Epic will hurt parks that have tried to slide through with off-the-shelf rides and half-baked festivals to drive attendance after the pandemic lockdowns. Discounting an inferior product with cheap annual passes can buy you market share for a little bit, but eventually people decide that they do not want an inferior product at any price.
Disney will be fine after Epic Universe opens. Florida's Walt Disney World Resort likely will take a bit of hit this summer, with only a couple of new shows and a parade to entice non-DVC visitors to come back to WDW in 2025. But plenty of potentially impressive new attractions are under construction or in development, positioning Disney to win back and expand its audience as the "new park smell" of Epic wears off. Both Disney and Universal have shown that they posses both the cash and the will to battle each other, raising standards for theme park attraction experiences, to win the business of fans around the world.
Everyone else? Eh.... It's going to be a fight among the rest of the industry to attract consumers who decide, for whatever reason, not to visit Orlando. The parks that invest in high quality experiences, from rides to shows to food to customer service, will beat their regional competition and live to see the 2030s and beyond. But for the rest? Commercial and residential real estate values may see more parks sold off for development if they cannot continue to run profitably under more intense competition.
Let this new, Epic era of American theme parks begin.
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oh yes it is (for those of you who are wondering, i'm not gone until monday) thank you for the amazing report, one of your best yet. Truly a fitting ending for my leave. This covered any question i had left, which include some seriously good questions, like the one about if it will achieve what universal wanted, and whether it will boost disney or any other park. And now all i have to do is wait. 5 years... what a roller coaster.
I can definitely see Epic negatively impacting attendance at Orlando area water parks, WDW, Sea World and perhaps US and IOA as well. But I am not convinced it will have much if any impact on regional amusement parks. Folks have very different expectations regarding a park that requires the commitment of a couple hundred bucks and a couple of hours in the car versus one that requires months of planning, a day waiting at airports and thousands of dollars that probably should have been deposited into Caitlyn, Katelyn or Kaitlin's college fund. I wouldn't be surprised if US economic chaos ends up helping the regional not quite theme parks, pushing families to grin and bear it while experiencing off the shelf rides and attending half baked festivals.
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Epic is a wonderful park and one of the few new Disney/Universal parks that are truly a full day (or more) experience. However, the relative cost of attending the new park (tickets hotels, food) compared to the 90s and 2000s seems significantly higher (maybe an article for another day). With our now blazing hot summers, much lighter visitation from Canada and Europe, and no passholders my guess is the park will be more open now than it will be if/when things improve in next few years.