Universal Destinations & Experiences promised Epic Universe will be a “transformational” experience for the theme park industry during a recent presentation at New York Comic Con, just days after its May 22, 2025 opening day announcement, and only two days before the new park’s first tickets went on sale to annual passholders.
Described during the Oct. 19 event as the first major American theme park in 25 years (and certainly the first to open in Orlando in more than two decades), guests looking to experience the 750-acre Epic Universe, which is currently billed as the company’s most ambitious park yet, can purchase 3-day, 4-day, or 5-day multi-park tickets beginning today, which will feature single day access to the five new lands.
That includes Celestial Park, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter — Ministry of Magic, Dark Universe, Super Nintendo World, and How to Train Your Dragon — Isle of Berk. Ticket holders can also book rooms at Helios Grand Hotel, the first hotel in the Orlando Resort’s history to exist within the walls of a park.
“We are going to transform the Universal Orlando Resort from what it is today into a full week-long destination, complete with four theme parks, 11 hotels, hundreds of experiences. It’s going to change the resort and the business as we know,” Steve Tatum, executive creative director of Universal’s Epic Universe, told a standing room-only crowd of hundreds on Saturday.
“It’s also going to transform the way theme parks are designed. It is a different model.”
Tatum pointed to the 2010 arrival of Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter as the first step in shifting away from the collection of experiences or “loosely themed lands” that parks have largely been since they’ve opened. Now, he says, “instead of going on a two-, three-, four-minute experience, you are immersed in a single story. What we’ve done is gone from the short storytelling business into the feature length storytelling business. Epic Universe is the first theme park in the entire world that is going to be comprised of exclusively feature-length stories.”
Those stories, Tatum teased, are driven by the belief that the reason people attend theme parks is, at its core, about making “memories with people that they love,” with parks themselves needing to “create the environments that will support this activity.” According to Epic Universe’s executive creative director, the new park will do this by tapping balancing emotions and storytelling.
“When you’re making a brand new theme park, you want to have a full range of emotions that appeal to a full range of guests,” he explained. “The reason that we’ve selected the stories that we have is because they are epic stories. I mean that in the sense that they’re brand expansive stories. We connect to people’s emotions, whether it is the exhilaration of flying on a meteor in [Celestial Park’s] Stardust Racers, whether it’s soaring with dragons, confronting monsters that scare and thrill and fright. Whether it’s the giddiness, the exhilaration or the terror, you have to have this full menu of emotions.”
Read below for more of new details on Epic Universe’s five-lands, as well as its Helios Grand Hotel.
Celestial Park
During the presentation, Tatum pushed back on some early descriptions of Celestial Park that have described Epic Universe as having only four IP-based lands. “Sometimes people say to me, your park has four IP lands, and I’m like, no, it has five. Just one of them is an IP land of our own invention, which is another creative exercise we’re thrilled about.”
For the Universal Destinations & Experiences team, according to Patrick Braillard, senior show writer at Universal Creative, that exercise has been focused on a single guiding principle: a place that puts the park back into theme park. The senior show writer frequently referred to attendees as explorers, with the land — which hosts the four portals leading to the park’s other experiences — in particular focusing on “the storytelling, the questing and all of the work that goes into exploring” being in the hands of park guests, he said.
That begins with the park’s first gate, the Kronos, which Braillard teased “is pulling down all the cosmic energy that allows us to be able to open up all of the portals to all of the possible worlds.” The Constellation Carousel, which gives parkgoers the chance to ride on constellations is “unlike any carousel you’ve ever been on,” Braillard explained. “To say carousel is kind of disingenuous. It makes it feel small. It’s not. Like anything in Epic Universe, it’s massive.”
The Wizarding World of Harry Potter — Ministry of Magic
Arguably one of the park’s most anticipated lands, Anisha Vyas Burgos, assistant director, projects at Universal Creative, teased a brand new storyline in the Wizarding Universe with the Ministry of Magic.
Parkgoers will enter it through the “Metro Floo,” a portal Burgos said was created in collaboration with the Harry Potter filmmakers, and interact with different lawn magic and activations in a place where everything will have a “French twist to it.” Tatum noted that it serves as a full-size “recreation of some of the sets from Fantastic Beasts,” with Braillard adding that the smallest buildings inside Wizarding Paris are taller than the biggest building in Diagon Alley.
“It takes place after the last film, so we’re really building on the entire story that you’ve come to love,” Burgos explained. “One of my favorite parts is our live show Le Cirque Arcanus. We really took inspiration from the Fantastic Beasts films… You get to go into this giant circus tent and come face-to-face with all of these fantastic beasts.”
For the ride Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry, guests will enter into the ministry atrium “at full scale, full glamor, full glory,” the assistant director, projects, teased. From there, they can travel to various Ministry offices, including a Hall of Ministers, where past wizards who held the role can be seen debating one another and discussing Umbridge’s upcoming trial. The ride itself, described by Burgos as “game-changing,” will see characters Umbridge, Ron, Harry, Hermione and the introduction of a new house elf.
Dark Universe
The conversation about the Classic Monsters revival within Universal’s theme parks kicked off by likening the ride of this highly anticipated land to the team’s work on its newest Florida thrill experience, the Jurassic World VelociCoaster. “[VelociCoaster] changed the roller coaster industry,” Greg Hall, assistant director, creative design at Universal Creative, told the NYCC crowd. “We want to do it again, but be able to provide that experience in a totally new fashion.”
Within the ride queue, attendees can expect to witness various experiments conducted by Victoria Frankenstein, the great, great granddaughter of Henry Frankenstein. In terms of the ride itself, Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment, Tatum urged that its intensity is not for younger children, but fans can expect to see how various monsters, once freed by Dracula, “interact with each other, how they interact with us. It is something that has never been done, even in the movies,” Hall said.
“You are watching where the movies went,” Braillard said of Darkmoore. “The land itself could be considered a sequel to the original films. We took everything from the original films and used that as the basis for all of the continued storytelling.”
During the presentation, it was shared that this will be different from what Halloween Horror Nights fans have experienced, even as Hall touched on a similar monster slate for“Darkmoor,” a ravaged village where Universal Creative has managed to amass horror’s earliest and most famed creatures. That includes Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, Bride of Frankenstein, the Brides of Dracula, Wolfman, the Phantom of the Opera and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. “We also have some cameos that we won’t reveal now, but you’ll be able to see them in the park,” Hall teased.
Super Nintendo World
The third park collaboration between Universal Creative and Nintendo, this world will once again bring the Mushroom Kingdom to life. “As I said earlier, when you play with the park, it plays back,” Braillard told the audience. “If you’ve been to any of the other iterations of Nintendo and Universal’s collaborations, you know that that happens to be a fact. You get to play with those lands and get to earn certain things and achievements as you make your way through.”
What will be different for fans of the video game franchise is the U.S. park expansion into Donkey Kong Country. Alongside Mine-Cart Madness, a ride previously teased as a unique coaster design where guests will have an experience akin to getting blasted out of a barrel and feeling as if they’re jumping over gaps while speeding over rickety track, there will also be Yoshi’s Adventure, a more widely accessible play experience across age demographics, and Mario Kart, homed inside Bowser’s Castle and currently available at Universal Studios Hollywood.
While fewer details were teased about Super Nintendo World, Braillard emphasized that “it’s important that the guests feel agency and feel that their experience and their exploration through the park remind them constantly that they are achieving things.”
How to Train Your Dragon — Isle of Berk
Tatum teased a How to Train Your Dragon 2.5 in terms of both design and storytelling for this land. “These [movies] are masterpieces, gorgeous works of art, and so the challenge for us is not just to bring those stories and the story of Hiccup, Astrid, and that whole cast of characters to life, but also convey that emotion and do it through the artistry. So we really looked at the art direction of it,” he told the crowd. “Over the course of that saga, dragons and Vikings come to coexist peacefully, and at that peak moment of harmony is when we enter the story.”
Parkgoers can expect to be welcomed to the Isle of Berk by two giant statues, a Viking and a dragon. “When we spoke to the art directors of the films, as that harmony becomes closer, the world becomes more colorful, so we are at peak color saturation. The choice of colors in every one of those design elements really serves that story point,” Tatum explained.
Inside, fans of How to Train Your Dragon will get to experience more attractions than any of the other lands. The land will also feature character appearances, and while Tatum didn’t get specific about what that will entail, he did note that “there are definite changes in meet and greets. There are advances that we’ve made, technologically speaking, but never for flash and bang by itself. It’s all about the story that we’ve done to enhance guest experiences.”
Helios Grand Hotel
The park’s latest collaboration with Loews Hotels, Tatum teased a new kind of resort experience, with the park “immediately adjacent to the hotel” and an entrance from the hotel into the park. “There’s no park that we have ever done in the United States, particularly, that has this experience,” he said. “If you want to know what’s happening at the theme park at three in the morning, get a room in this hotel.”
The hotel will feature suites themed after How to Train Your Dragon, and a larger connection to Celestial Park. “Helios has astrological, celestial and heavenly thematic elements. We have looked at all kinds of things in our research: the Hubble telescope, photos, maps of the solar system, the orbits of the planets,” Tatum explained. “And why celestial? Because that’s the greatest frontier. That’s about exploration. The idea of Epic Universe is to go to worlds beyond which have never been seen, where nobody’s ever been.”
English (US) ·