Looking back over past years to remind myself, it seems very clear that the problem this year WASN’T the houses. It was all the seemingly unimportant little stuff - unappealing merch design, lack of Cabana Bay photo op, poor choice of Tribute Store theme, one lonely overly-familiar show, less immersive Coconut Club, and - most of all - incredibly cheap scarezones (with the exception of NY). Even something as minor as the lack of HHN plastic press machines contributes to the overall malaise. The houses themselves were strong.
This year’s HHN seems like a very stark lesson that a resort can’t keep chipping away at all those little, silly, insignificant things without having a profound cumulative effect on the total experience. Put another way, no detail at a major theme park is ever really unimportant.
I 100% agree. I was there for the last event night yesterday, and my group had issues finding things to do. I've never really experienced that before at the event.
Getting in and out of HNF was a literal nightmare for me with how stuffy, crowded, warm, time-consuming, and difficult it is to experience. The tribute store was really lacking this year, and didn't feel like it had the love that the wonderful Summer '24 one does. The HHN bar meet n greet characters never amounted to much of anything for myself either, I had no desire to awkwardly and silently interact with a random Goblin from Goblin's Feast. The Death Eaters battling guests with wands was fun, but also pretty difficult to actually see with how situational those moments were, especially in an area I had little reason to walk around in anyways. They tried something with the Blumhouse Wolfman, but that thing got laughed out of the event very quickly.
The show moments in the zones this year were really short and repetitive. The tongue cutting in Torture Faire was kinda cute the first few times, but it's a pretty small-scale gag without a ton of flash or energy. All of Surreal's show moments in Demon Queens were about 15 seconds long each, have no time to breathe, and all end with an awkward whimper. It felt like no one really knew what to do with them, cast and guest alike. The silence was always palpable after each one. Surreal and Sinister monologuing got a lot more dull than Oddfellow last year, in my mind because the characters are just a lot simpler and vaguer than he was. The performers just had a lot less to work with. Blumhouse, Zombies, and Duality had literally nothing to offer for entertainment outside of very basic scareacting behaviors.
A Lagoon show. A smaller stage show. The M3gan hordes. Roaming hordes in general. Street stilts. David S Pumpkins. Jack meeting randomly in house queues or zones. The show moments in zones like Jungle of Doom, Vamp 85, Chucky, Conjure the Dark, Seek and Destroy. I wanted to go on Transformers multiple times across the event, as it's one of the few dark rides in the park, and it wasn't open. There were so many little things that the event had done in previous years that weren't around this time. Any one of these would've vastly improved the experience, but they were nowhere to be found this time.
With how long the house lines were, and actually the ride lines too which I've never seen before, they really needed to offer something to do in between those long and boring waits.
Mix it with a lack of identity and cohesion, half-baked and repetitive concepts, a less exciting IP lineup, and it was just an event that didn't deliver in the way that they have in years past.
On paper, I think the lineup was more than enough.
Would going more in-depth with the punk aesthetic have helped? Maybe. The disjointedness added to many of fans' subpar reviews, but that wouldn't change what people thought of the zones and houses.
I disagree. On paper, Shipyard 32 and Blumzone are incredibly similar zones. Cheaper San Fran reusing props and costumes from previous events, with pretty similar cast dynamics and energy. What elevated Shipyard for me personally was the connection to the Icon, and the rest of the event. Once you leave Torture Faire or Demon Queens, Sinister and Surreal lose all power over the event, and the park and offerings feel incredibly strange and lop-sided because of it, at least personally. I believe the connections and theming lift the entire event up, even the weakest offerings are better for it.