In a recent interview, Universal Destinations & Experiences CEO Mark Woodbury talked about Epic Universe expansion plans, Universal Kids Resort, the U.K. resort, and more.
Epic Universe Expansion Plans
Highlights from the interview with Jessica Reif Ehrlich, BofA Securities Inc. analyst, were shared by the Orlando Sentinel. Woodbury said Epic Universe, which opened as part of Universal Orlando Resort this past May, is off to a “pretty great start.”
“It’s doing exactly what we wanted it to do,” he explained, “in terms of driving incremental attendance to the resort as a whole and the performance line for caps, very strong since we opened the doors. And you can see it in merchandise. You see it in the food offerings. A lot of great creative work went into both of those. Not without challenges when you open an entire theme park at once. […] It’s always a little complicated to get it to ramp up to full speed, and we’re in the process of doing that now. Nothing that we didn’t expect.”
Operational issues have led to low rankings for Epic Universe on travel review websites. But maybe an exciting expansion could change that.
“If you fly over Epic or you look at Google Earth,” Woodbury said, “you’ll see how we planned the park, and you’ll see greenfield space between the existing worlds, and that is strategically positioned to give us flexibility to expand the world or create a new world, and so that’s how we look at it. I don’t really have anything to announce specifically as attractions, but I can tell you that there are multiple attractions in the works, not just at Epic, but when you have the three parks, the cadence of product delivery across the resort to continue to drive the resort is really a key part of our strategy going forward. […] We have a clear line of sight into how far we can take this. It’s considerable, and we have a pretty sophisticated and well thought-through long-range plan that takes us out another decade in terms of product offerings, not just in Orlando, but around the world.”
Woodbury previously teased expansion plans, as did Karen Irwin, President and COO of Universal Orlando Resort.
Woodbury addressed rumors of a Wicked land spurred on by his previous statements. “I think I might have stirred that pot when I saw the Wicked sets and said it was a theme park waiting to happen,” he said. But he didn’t say a Wicked area was out of the question.
There have also been rumors of a Legend of Zelda expansion to Super Nintendo World.
Universal Kids Resort
Universal Kids Resort is set to open next year in Frisco, Texas, with lands inspired by Shrek, Jurassic World, Trolls, SpongeBob SquarePants, and more.
“We have a terrific pipeline of intellectual property in the form of DreamWorks and Trolls and Gabby’s Dollhouse to build around,” Woodbury said about the resort. “And so Frisco is our first Universal Kids Resort that allows us to both segment the audience and segment our portfolio of properties and in the process build a regional product that is sort of a rite of passage for families and much more accessible for young families in a regional form. They get to that park from all over Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and 300-room hotel as part of it, great product and a feeder as they age up to become aligned with our brand and then grow into our bigger parks.”
It’s worth noting that Woodbury called this their “first” Universal Kids Resort, leaving the door open for more.
Universal Horror Unleashed
The new year-round horror destination in Las Vegas opened a few weeks ago. Woodbury said that “reaction to the product has been really great, and performance to the product has been really great from a per-cap standpoint.”
“I know people comment often recently that Vegas business is down,” he added. “They still have close to 40 million tourists that come to Vegas, and we only need a very small margin for that to make this very profitable.”
A second Universal Horror Unleashed is coming to Chicago. Woodbury said they chose Las Vegas and Chicago “because they have a great base population and they have big inbound tourists.” He noted that Halloween Horror Nights has been a “great success,” but it’s localized to Orlando and Los Angeles.
Check out our tour of Universal Horror Unleashed.
Universal Studios Great Britain
The England park doesn’t have an official name yet, but development is well underway. “Our hope is that that process will go very smoothly,” said Woodbury. “But parks are complicated organisms, and this takes some infrastructure in the form of rail expansion and highway off-ramps and things like that — not things that we haven’t done before, but they’re complicated. […] We think we have a pretty good handle on it at this point.”
“The best way to look at it is look at it like one of our standalone parks,” he explained. “It’s a full-blown Universal theme park with a 500-room hotel that is part of it, very much like Epic in terms of a big park with a hotel. It’s designed in a way that we don’t see as cannibalistic to our strong UK visitation to Orlando. So we’ve created a different mix of attractions that we think will work great in the UK, but basically it’ll perform very much like one of our standalone parks in terms of attendance, in terms of per caps and overall EBITDA performance.”
With regards to the U.K. weather, Woodbury said, “You design it in a way that allows you to really take advantage of the great weather and protect against the inclement weather as best you can. But Japan, it gets very cold in the winter, very hot in the summer. China has its cold climate as well. The issue in UK is precipitation, but you’d be surprised to find that it’s a lot less than Orlando, and it just rains. It rains less and more frequently, which is not a bad problem. The torrential downpours are the bigger realm.”
No attractions or lands have been confirmed for the U.K. park. Woodbury did address the differences in creating a theme park for an international audience, stating, “When you get into the detail of design […] the main product is Universal, and it’s Universal-branded IPs, but then you get really focused. Menu – it’s very unique culturally. You have to pay close attention to that. And the other place where international development is unique is around humor. Humor varies very differently in different cultures.”
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