Inside Universal Forums

Welcome to the Inside Universal Forums! Register a free account today to become a member. Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members and unlock our forums features!

  • Signing up for a Premium Membership is a donation to help Inside Universal maintain costs and offers an ad-free experience on the forum. Learn more about it here.

Hong Kong Disneyland $1.4 Billion Overhaul

I wonder how the length of this compares to the Werewolf coaster at Epic?
If the wolf coaster indeed has a swing launch segment, it will be much longer, I'd imagine.
Hasn't the (speculative but informed) consensus been that it's going to be a little over a minute?

I think it will more come down to how much of a show scene happens inside the barn, and how long that lasts.
 
Depending on the size of the train, they might have to keep it within 60 secs the way the ride is built. You can only have one train on the layout, outside of the station, so if you only have 16 people per train, you need to keep the time between the launch and final break zone within 60 secs just to achieve a similar throughput to Hippogriff.
 
The World of Frozen looks great. It reminds me of an expanded Norway Pavilion. The one thing I don’t understand is why there isn’t anything in Arendelle Castle. It looks like it’s closed off to the guests and is just for show?
 
This park has always struggled to find an audience, except during cultural holidays. It just might have the most beautiful setting of any theme park. It was originally built too small, but there's been a number of very significant expansions, in the past decade or so, with some real nice attractions. During the few years prior to 2023, it was probably closed more than it was open due to covid lockdowns. The new Frozen land looks pretty good. Robert Niles, Theme Park Insider, just spent a few days documenting the newer overall park attractions on a visit there. Niles did a walking tour on a nice weather day. I watched the video. The overall park crowd was fairly sparse, with the most people on Main Street, TSL, and the Fantasyland area. Mystic Manor and Grizzly Gulch, two excellent E tickets looked like walk ons. The new Frozen land is a bit off the beaten path, and it looks like very few guests are venturing back there. It had, by far, the smallest number of guests of any of the parks' lands. Perhaps two dozen people at most. A few were walking into the Frozen attraction. No one was at the game booths. A handful of guests were walking around looking. Another few walking into the kiddie coaster entrance. The trains were running and they looked nearly empty. This is not a good sign when your highly publicized new land, that's very fetching, fails to register a crowd. The Toy Story Land, which is mostly non descript flats, had significantly more guests, looked like a couple hundred, than the Frozen area.
 
I don’t think opening a ginormous park in mainland China has done this park any favors. Particularly after a relatively lackluster opening.
True, but it's never done well. The hoped for mainland Chinese never showed up to visit, even before Shanghai was built. The park was placed to capitalize on the huge tourist industry between Hong Kong and the casinos in adjacent territories. But the political situation has caused a near complete collapse of tourism. It's doubtful that a vibrant tourist industry will return in the near future. And, as you basically said, Shanghai, a more complete park, will continue to get the bulk of mainland Chinese visitors. This park is kind of doomed to ever get more than the numbers IOA got before Potter. It's going to be tough to ever make any real profits there. Fortunate for Disney, they only minority share the ownership with Hong Kong investors.
 
If I were Disney, I'd start auditing the analytics departments to figure out who is creating the reports that support decision-making in this company. If the decisions are made by the CEO without any support, the board should relieve him of his duties. Too many decision have gone sideways lately across multiple business units under the Disney umbrella.
 
True, but it's never done well. The hoped for mainland Chinese never showed up to visit, even before Shanghai was built. The park was placed to capitalize on the huge tourist industry between Hong Kong and the casinos in adjacent territories. But the political situation has caused a near complete collapse of tourism. It's doubtful that a vibrant tourist industry will return in the near future. And, as you basically said, Shanghai, a more complete park, will continue to get the bulk of mainland Chinese visitors. This park is kind of doomed to ever get more than the numbers IOA got before Potter. It's going to be tough to ever make any real profits there. Fortunate for Disney, they only minority share the ownership with Hong Kong investors.
This is more or less what I was going to say. Dating back to the mid 2010s there have been huge obstacles thrown at the park - crackdowns on short-term visas from the mainland to curb parallel trading, the 2019 protests, Covid… these all had as big or bigger impact as the 2001/2008 recessions had on WDW. It’s also just not in a very good location - the Macau bridge should have helped but that opened right at the start of the things listed above.

If I were Disney, I'd start auditing the analytics departments to figure out who is creating the reports that support decision-making in this company. If the decisions are made by the CEO without any support, the board should relieve him of his duties. Too many decision have gone sideways lately across multiple business units under the Disney umbrella.
Problem is you can use facts to prove anything.

This timeline is substantially better than if they had built the fully-designed HK second gate that would be opening about now. I suspect that part of the reason they’re not too bothered about pulling the plug on things like Harmonious and Starcruiser is because the actual use of that money (some misses mixed in with the hits) is substantially better than what could have happened - having a second park that’s less useful than the Covid quarantine city that was built on the land instead.
 
This is more or less what I was going to say. Dating back to the mid 2010s there have been huge obstacles thrown at the park - crackdowns on short-term visas from the mainland to curb parallel trading, the 2019 protests, Covid… these all had as big or bigger impact as the 2001/2008 recessions had on WDW. It’s also just not in a very good location - the Macau bridge should have helped but that opened right at the start of the things listed above.


Problem is you can use facts to prove anything.

This timeline is substantially better than if they had built the fully-designed HK second gate that would be opening about now. I suspect that part of the reason they’re not too bothered about pulling the plug on things like Harmonious and Starcruiser is because the actual use of that money (some misses mixed in with the hits) is substantially better than what could have happened - having a second park that’s less useful than the Covid quarantine city that was built on the land instead.

Absolutely true about the use of numbers/facts. Many business leaders fit the facts to their narrative rather than the other way around.
 
Top