I also find it weird that, for all the internet discourse there was complaining that Disney was devoting a whole land to Avatar (remember when people would pull up Google Trends lol), there’s been nothing about a whole park devoted to How to Train Your Dragon, Fantastic Beasts, and the 1920’s Universal Monster movies. I’m extremely curious as to what this park looks like 20 years from now when all but Nintendo has faded into obscurity and the Monsters remain as esoteric (though ”timeless” they may be) as they are now.
I get that Harry Potter changed the game, but this park feels like a Dubai imitation. You expect Disney to miss a step when trying to replicate Potter, but Universal literally invented this and it still feels like Epic Universe is a big misunderstanding as to what made Hogsmeade so successful.
That’s not to say I think it’ll be a bad park…I just think there’s an additional narrative here beyond how successful opening year is and how cool the rides are. The question will be what UO does when the next big thing comes around and they’ve pigeonholed their largest expansion space ever with a few cartoons that kinda sorta had a moment in the 2010’s.