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.

Nintendo Coming to Universal Parks

Just a fun survey question: Which SNW do you hope/want to visit first? Will you wait for Orlando’s version to open, or will you go to Osaka/Hollywood instead?

Osaka, then probably Orlando, more so for the new park.

Ironically zero plans for Hollywood and it is by far the closest to me.

Announced in 2015. Will open in USJ in 2019/2020. So 4-5 years, not 7

I think you can safely rule out 2019. It's nowhere near that far along. But the point still stands.
 
Just for the sake of clarity, when was it confirmed by the company that Nintendo was coming - in some capacity - to Orlando? Was that not also sometime in 2015?

The partnership was announced in May of 15' with Osaka revealing their initial key-art in December of either 15' or 16' (thinking 16).

Then Osaka broke ground in June of last year, and in January of this year, they began quite a bit of the vertical work.
 
Yea, and it was also confirmed that it would open first in Osaka around 2020.

So, technically, Orlando's version still is going to rival Pandora in the time from announcement to opening. Granted, they were not originally accounting for the whole projecting shifting over to the next gate, so that's partially responsible for the elongated lead time.
 
So, technically, Orlando's version still is going to rival Pandora in the time from announcement to opening. Granted, they were not originally accounting for the whole projecting shifting over to the next gate, so that's partially responsible for the elongated lead time.

Yea, otherwise it would have been open in 2020 or 21. I think the comparison is a bad one.
 
For the record, Pandora was 5.5 years (Sept 2011 to May 2017), not 7.

So indeed, the analogy is perfectly reasonable for Osaka and actually a bad analogy for Orlando because that project was pushed back by 18 months to 2 years for completely different reasons.

5 years is a completely appropriate development cycle time when you announce something at the inception of a licensing partnership. People seem to forget Tom Staggs in September of 2011 literally said: "From start to finish, a project of this size and scope takes about 5 years to design and build. We can’t give you an exact date but we know that when it’s complete, it’s going to be a truly unforgettable experience."

So really this isn't all that surprising.
 
So, technically, Orlando's version still is going to rival Pandora in the time from announcement to opening. Granted, they were not originally accounting for the whole projecting shifting over to the next gate, so that's partially responsible for the elongated lead time.


In my eyes, if you bring Orlando into the time frame, you should bring in the other Disney parks. From what I recall, when they announced the deal with Camron, it was to bring aspects of Pandora to all of the Disney parks starting with Orlando’s Animal Kingdom.

That is not much different than Nintendo announcing a deal with Universal to bring a presence to Universal parks starting with Japan.
 
For the record, Pandora was 5.5 years (Sept 2011 to May 2017), not 7.

So indeed, the analogy is perfectly reasonable for Osaka and actually a bad analogy for Orlando because that project was pushed back by 18 months to 2 years for completely different reasons.

5 years is a completely appropriate development cycle time when you announce something at the inception of a licensing partnership. People seem to forget Tom Staggs in September of 2011 literally said: "From start to finish, a project of this size and scope takes about 5 years to design and build. We can’t give you an exact date but we know that when it’s complete, it’s going to be a truly unforgettable experience."

So really this isn't all that surprising.

Fair enough. I brainfarted and thought Pandora was announced 2010.
Welp, Screamscape just reported that Avatar might be added to Shanghai Disneyland. That was convenient.

Hey, another reason why I don't feel the need to ever go out of my way to see that park
 
Pandora at Shanghai will be just FoP and a downsized version, no need for River Journey.

Back to Nintendo, I'd rather put blame on Nintendo for telling Uni to announce so early. If it were Universal's decision it would still not have been announced.

I think they would've delayed the announcement until Osaka was the one to break news, but yeah; if things would've went a particular way, I doubt we would've seen any of Nintendo officially mentioned in Media up until the point of the Osaka reveal.
 
Top