Three months after its grand opening in Orlando, Epic Universe is beating internal forecasts and the park has plenty of room between its current five lands to expand them or set new ones, the chairman and CEO of Universal Destinations & Experiences Mark Woodbury said today.
Asked at a media conference about a possible Wicked land, he said. “I think I must stir that pot. When I saw the Wicked sets, [I] said it was a theme park waiting to happen.”
“If you fly over Epic, or you look at Google Earth, you’ll see how we planned the park, and you’ll see green build space between the existing worlds. And that is strategically positioned to give us flexibility to expand the world or create a new world,” he told investors at the BofA Securities Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference. “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.”
The first new U.S. theme park in 25 years opened in late May with Super Nintendo World, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter: Ministry of Magic, How to Train Your Dragon: Isle of Berk, Celestial Park; and Dark Universe.
As much as analyst Jessica Reif Erlich prodded, Woodbury declined to give numbers of any sort for Epic post-launch. “We’re very pleased,” he said.
We’re “not giving up specific guidance on Epic, but I can tell you that the performance on food and beverage and merchandise exceed our expectations considerably, and the front gate of Epic is a premium over the other two parks. And then when you look at the incremental attendance growth at the resort, and combined with those per caps, it’s a pretty, pretty great start.” He believes Epic will grow the Orlando theme park market overall as well as increase Universal’s market share there. Larger rival Walt Disney is also investing.
A new park in London is the next big-ticket push with an opening slated for 2031. Universal is in the consultation process, having submitted 10,000 pages of documents to the government to support the project. Its own due diligence and testing showed 93% support for the project in the community, he said. “We have had 18,000 people register on our app to come and work for us, 2,000 vendors in the marketplace that want to be part of this development. So our hope is that that process will go very smoothly. 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 … But we think we have a pretty good handle on it.”
Universal Studios Japan in Osaka, which will be 25 next year, looks set for a nice ride as the Japanese government is in the midst of a push to boost tourism to the country by 50%, to about 60 million people a year. Woodbury said one in seven tourists to Japan visit Universal Studios.
Meanwhile, the Comcast division is expanding its footprint in horror as well as with younger kids and in local markets to bring the Universal brand to new audiences. That includes the year-round Universal Horror Unleashed opening in Las Vegas next week – an extension of the popular seasonal Halloween Horror Nights at the Orlando and Hollywood parks — and the Universal Kids Resort in Frisco, Texas, targeting families with kids three to eight years old and drawing on a pipeline of the studio’s younger-skewing intellectual property.
Frisco “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 can get to that park from all over Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas.” It will open next year with a 300 room hotel.
The next Horror Unleashed is planned for Chicago in 2028, Woodbury said.
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