The new Epic Universe in Florida marks the first new major theme park in the United States in nearly a quarter century, lives up to the hype created during the years of buildup and ups the ante in Universal’s crosstown showdown with rival Walt Disney World.
I took part in a media preview of Universal Epic Universe over the weekend in Orlando that included a full day in the park and access to virtually all of the rides, attractions, shows, restaurants, shops and experiences.
The new Epic Universe theme park located on Universal’s new 750-acre south campus near Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center officially opens to the public on May 22 just before Memorial Day Weekend.
It has been 24 years since a major theme park has opened in the United States. I was there in 2001 when Disney California Adventure opened to low attendance and withering reviews.
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The built-on-the-cheap $600 million DCA deserved the poor reception and Disney acknowledged the misstep in 2007 with an ambitious $1.1 billion makeover.
Most of the major theme parks in the United States were built in the 1970s or earlier. Since then, new parks have been few and far between.
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Disney’s Animal Kingdom (1998) and Universal’s Islands of Adventure (1999) were the last major theme parks built in the U.S. before Disney California Adventure.
Legoland has opened parks in Carlsbad (1999), Florida (2011) and New York (2021) — but they all tended to follow a familiar blueprint that hasn’t changed much since the 1960s.
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The star-crossed Hard Rock Park opened in 2008 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and only lasted a season before filing for bankruptcy due to poor attendance and other financial problems.
Universal hasn’t repeated the mistakes of Disney California Adventure with Epic Universe and the chances of the new park being forced to close after only a year are close to zero.
The $7 billion Universal Epic Universe will blow your mind and exceed your highest expectations. The newest Universal theme park in Florida is worthy of all the hype.
I’ve previously written previews of Epic Universe’s five themed lands: Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic, How to Train Your Dragon – Isle of Berk, Dark Universe, Super Nintendo World and Celestial Park.
I’ll have more to say about Epic Universe before opening day, but for now here are my initial impressions of the new Universal theme park that raises the bar for excellence in the industry and throws down the gauntlet in the never-ending battle with rival Disney World.
Celestial Park
Three things came to mind as I wandered through Celestial Park: Islands of Adventure, Main Street U.S.A. and Tomorrowland.
Epic Universe took the best of two classic theme park designs — the Disneyland’s spoke-and-hub and Epcot’s central lake — and combined them into one.
Celestial Park essentially served as the central hub of Epic Universe — much like Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom.
The twist was you have to return to Celestial Park after visiting each of the other lands. None of the four lands on the outer rim of the park connected to each other. The only way to get from one land to another was through Celestial Park.
That certainly made Epic Universe less navigable as a theme park — but it also made each land feel more distinct and independent.
I really liked returning to the neutral ground of Celestial Park after visiting each of the other lands — like a palette cleanse in a multicourse meal. It made each land feel like a self-contained miniature theme park, much the way Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge feels like it stands alone while still being a part of Disneyland.
Epic Universe had a string of water bodies as its focal point in Celestial Park — much like Islands of Adventure or Epcot.
Universal shrunk the water bodies in Celestial Park so that the elemental element was omnipresent but not a constant obstacle.
In addition to serving as Epic’s entry promenade, Celestial Park is its own land with a few attractions and an outer space theme similar to Tomorrowland.
Universal Creative wisely avoided the problems of Tomorrowland — the future always catches up to the present — by creating an otherworldly land focused on the cosmos and celestial bodies without getting trapped in a space race it could never win.
What Epic lacked was what Walt Disney called a weenie — a central focal point like Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle or Epcot’s Spaceship Earth.
As a result, the massive Helios Grand Hotel loomed over the entire park in a way that I expect will not age well. The hotel offered panoramic views of Epic Universe and direct access to the park, but it also broke the illusion that I had traveled to another universe by letting the outside world into the theme park.
The other biggest problem with the park will be cured with time and age. There were several places where I could see outside the park — which doesn’t have a berm like Disneyland. The fantasy bubble burst every time I saw a bus or a car driving by just beyond the fence line. The problem eventually will solve itself when the trees planted along the perimeter mature over the years and decades.
The big attraction in Celestial Park was Stardust Racers, which I rode three times during the media preview. The dueling roller coaster was intense. The best part of the ride: The near-miss interactions between the tandem trains that raced side-by-side and criss-crossed throughout the twisting twin-track course.
I missed a few things in Celestial Park. I must have passed by the Constellation Carousel in the middle of Celestial Park a half dozen times — always on my way to a new land.
There was also an hourly water show in one of the central pools in Celestial Park that turns into a nighttime show with lights in the evening.
I’m sure I will catch them both on my next visit.
Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic
I could have spent all day in the newest addition to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Epic Universe.
The third Potter land created by Universal in Orlando combined a recreation of the Ministry of Magic set amid the streets of Paris from “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.”
How did Universal manage to wedge the Ministry of Magic into the capital of France? Magic, of course.
The British Ministry of Magic played a prominent role in the second “Fantastic Beasts” film that was largely set in Paris.
Like the first two Wizarding Worlds, the third edition was filled with shops, eateries, store windows and dark corners stuffed to the rafters with Potter storytelling.
There was only one word that could describe the new Ministry of Magic dark ride at Universal Epic Universe: Wow.
Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry sends you on a ride aboard a magic lift through the subway-like elevator tunnels running throughout the Ministry of Magic.
Universal Creative has done a masterful job combining a motion-based platform ride vehicle with plenty of practical sets, animatronics and massive video screens.
“Le Cirque Arcanus” was essentially a Potter-themed circus set up like a museum of living curiosities and menagerie of marvelous monstrosities.
The 15-minute magic show with a barker-like pre-show performance featured a host of magical creatures appearing and disappearing in animatronic and costumed forms.
The newest Wizarding World land was filled with plenty of interactive windows that could be activated by the magic wands purchased in the Cosme Acajor Baguettes Magique shop.
My favorite window featured a moving and talking Hogwarts portrait of the celebrated witch and seer Cassandra Trelawney carrying on conversations with visitors. The responses seemed live and genuine rather than canned and recorded. At one point, Cassandra spoke with a visitor named Peace.
“That’s an unusual name,” Cassandra said. “You must not get into many quarrels.”
Dark Universe
Dark Universe dropped visitors into the ravaged Darkmoor Village overrun by famous film monsters from classic Universal Studios horror movies of the 1920s to the 1950s.
I ran into the Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein and Ygor the hunchback assistant — who all brought the land to life with their in-story play acting.
The centerpiece of the grim, forbidding and shadowy village was Frankenstein Manor, which houses the Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment dark ride.
Ygor reappeared in a pre-show video for the dark ride demonstrating the Kuka arm ride vehicle that made it look like I would be whipped around like a rag doll on the end of a paint mixer.
Fortunately, that was nowhere near the case. The robot arm aimed riders like a sentient movie camera at the most important parts of every scene in the dark ride.
The animatronics in the pre-show and dark ride were often so life-like that I often wondered if they were actors.
The Curse of the Werewolf roller coaster was much faster than I expected for a family ride. I’ve never been on a spinning coaster that left me that dizzy. Hopefully, with enough feedback, Universal will tame the spinning a bit, especially at the end of the ride.
The best part of the ride occurred in the middle when the train failed to climb a hill and turned briefly into a shuttle coaster. A powerful launch sent us on our way through the rest of the ride. It was a great family coaster with plenty of thrills.
The Burning Blade Tavern attracted the most attention in Darkmoor Village, with crowds gathered outside waiting for the windmill atop the restaurant to burst into flames.
Universal has a way to control the flames so they don’t ignite if a bird happens to be flying past. The darkly opulent Das Stakehaus serves a Bird on a Stake — but none of the fowl is harvested from the park.
How to Train Your Dragon — Isle of Berk
Dragons were everywhere in the Isle of Berk. There were animatronic dragons, robotic dragons, walk-around dragon characters and meet-and-greet dragon photo ops. I suspect Universal decided to hold back the flying drone dragons until opening day.
But I got to see one flying dragon in “The Untrainable Dragon” show.
The 20-minute Broadway-style live show was essentially “How to Train Your Dragon: The Musical” with Vikings breaking out into song and dance like a Disney movie.
The highlight of the show was Hiccup flying over the audience on the back of an animatronic 1,100-pound Toothless dragon with a 27-foot-wide wingspan.
I rode the Hiccup’s Wing Gliders roller coaster twice. The second time around I threw my hands in the air and screamed for joy throughout the great family coaster designed for repeat rides with plenty of speed, twists and turns.
I was less thrilled with the Dragon Racer’s Rally that was a lot of work without a lot of pay off. The interactive winged ride promised teeter-totter seats that spun while soaring through the air. But the frustratingly slow ride was over before it started with a little rocking but no propeller spinning. The ride operator said the spinning seats were an acquired art that required repeat rides to master.
I had a blast on the Fyre Drill splash battle ride even though I hate getting wet at theme parks. Heed the warnings: You will get soaked. You’ll also have a ton of fun trying to squirt targets and other riders along the way. Fortunately it was a hot day in the 90s and there was a full body dryer at the exit that helped dry me off.
The Isle of Berk had the most to do in Epic Universe and I could see the land being packed with families once the park officially opens to the public.
Super Nintendo World
Super Nintendo World stuck out like a sore thumb in the otherwise beautifully landscaped and designed Epic Universe.
The nature of the video game themed land required Super Nintendo World to be completely surrounded by 30-foot-tall walls. The result was a big green box in one corner of the park that no amount of painted rolling hills could hide.
Once inside, most of the over-stimulating, intense and chaotic land will be familiar to anyone who has been following the rollout of the Super Nintendo Worlds at Universal’s California and Japan parks over the past few years. There was a lot to look at and even more to do.
Unlike the other two lands, Universal Creative decided to put an escalator inside the green warp tunnel to inexplicably carry visitors to the upper level of the land just to make them immediately descend back down a staircase to get to all the attractions.
The star of the show was the Mine-Cart Madness boom coaster that was making its American debut.
I rode the track-jumping Donkey Kong coaster twice and found the experience to be pretty rough as the mine cart rumbled and rattled over each broken track piece.
I sat in both the front and back rows and was able to see the track both times as our coaster train jumped over missing sections of track — which was key to enjoying the gimmick of the ride.
I definitely felt like I was riding through a video game. The coaster with a low height requirement will undoubtedly be a hit with families.
Yoshi’s Island was a very short and slow people mover-style ride. I rode with a dad who grew up playing Yoshi video games as a kid who couldn’t wait to bring his own son back to experience the kiddie ride.
Super Nintendo World also features a Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge that is a carbon copy of the augmented reality racing simulator rides that can be found at Universal’s California and Japan parks.