Epic Universe is an impressive addition to Universal Orlando that brings together some of the resort’s most ambitious theming. Its portal concept transports guests into distinct worlds, creating an experience unlike anything found at other theme parks, while many of its attractions feature impressive special effects. After years of anticipation, Universal has delivered a park that represents a significant evolution for the resort.
Unfortunately, the park has several operational shortcomings, including terrible attraction capacity and an overreliance on outdoor rides, both of which can negatively impact the guest experience.
More than a year after opening, Epic Universe continues to struggle with attraction throughput, and it’s difficult to overlook when you consider how much time guests can spend waiting for rides. Many of the park’s rides rely on relatively small vehicles, have limited dispatch rates, or face other operational constraints that keep them from accommodating the number of guests you would expect at a brand-new major theme park costing roughly $7 billion. The rides themselves can be impressive, but their overall capacity throughout the day tells a very different story.
This is one of those situations where the number of attractions in a park doesn’t really tell you how much capacity the park actually has. Epic Universe has 11 rides, but what matters much more is how many guests those rides can collectively move each hour. A park can have plenty of attractions and still struggle with capacity if too many of them are relatively low throughput, and that is exactly what I think has happened at Epic Universe.
A related issue is that Epic Universe has far too many outdoor rides and not enough indoor ones, making capacity limitations even more apparent during the summer—peak season—when thunderstorms are frequent. Florida’s unpredictable weather can force more than half of the park’s rides to close for safety reasons when storms pass through the area. When that happens, guests are left with only four operating rides and a few shows.
That creates a situation where the park’s two biggest problems compound each other. Epic Universe already has relatively low throughput on a handful of its attractions, and when a thunderstorm takes additional rides offline, all of those guests have to go somewhere. The attractions that remain open suddenly have even more people waiting for them, which can push already lengthy waits even higher.
Indoor attractions are highly valuable in Florida because they can remain operational during many of the weather conditions that force outdoor rides to shut down, helping maintain a more consistent lineup of available experiences.
I would have much rather seen Universal build fewer outdoor attractions and put that investment toward additional indoor attractions, particularly ones with strong capacity. If that meant Epic Universe opened with fewer than 11 rides, I don’t think that would have been a bad thing. I would rather have a park with eight or nine attractions that can collectively move large numbers of people and continue operating during bad weather than a park with more attractions that struggle to handle crowds and can lose a significant portion of its ride lineup due to weather.
Epic Universe’s shortage of indoor attractions highlights a major misstep in the park’s development and is particularly frustrating considering Universal’s decades of experience operating theme parks in the state. That gave the company familiarity with these challenges and plenty of experience with the advantages and disadvantages of different attraction designs. The company knew what kind of weather Central Florida experiences, knew guests would arrive in large numbers, and knew attraction capacity would be one of the biggest factors affecting the guest experience.
Universal Studios Florida is especially interesting to compare with Epic Universe because it has a large selection of indoor attractions. While the park can certainly be affected by weather, many of its rides are housed indoors, allowing them to continue operating during thunderstorms. That gives guests considerably more options when the weather turns bad.
Islands of Adventure has more similarities to Epic Universe in this regard because it also has a substantial number of outdoor attractions that can close during thunderstorms. Universal has added rides to the park over the years, helping distribute guests and add capacity, but its weather-related vulnerability still exists. Epic Universe was a completely new park, which gave Universal an opportunity to approach the issue differently, yet it decided to repeat the same limitations instead of learning from it.
The overall capacity issue at Epic Universe has also created another problem that has been discussed by Universal fans for quite some time: the lack of an annual pass option that includes the park.
Universal has yet to add the park to its annual pass program. Passholders still have to purchase separate tickets to visit the park. The company has indicated that an annual pass option could eventually be offered, including through surveys that have explored the idea, while Jeff Polk, Universal Orlando’s executive vice president and general manager of Epic Universe, has said that annual passes for the park could come “all in good time.”
There is a fairly obvious operational concern behind that decision. If the park is already struggling to provide enough attraction capacity for its existing crowds, Universal has to consider what would happen if passholders were to make the park a regular part of their visits.
The frustrating part is that none of this takes away from how good the park actually is. Epic Universe has some phenomenal attractions with fantastic theming and effects, and the five themed worlds are incredibly well executed. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic, SUPER NINTENDO WORLD, Dark Universe, How to Train Your Dragon – Isle of Berk, and Celestial Park each feel like substantial experiences, and Universal deserves a lot of credit for the level of detail that went into the park.
That is exactly why the capacity issues are so frustrating. Universal built a park capable of drawing massive crowds but did not provide enough high-capacity attractions to accommodate those crowds efficiently.
I don’t think the answer is simply adding more rides for the sake of increasing the park’s attraction count. What Epic Universe needs is more useful capacity. Future attractions should ideally be designed to accommodate large numbers of guests, operate efficiently, and provide another option in bad weather. An indoor attraction with strong throughput can solve several problems at once.
Universal will obviously have opportunities to improve the park over time, and plans for new attractions are already underway, but this really should have been addressed from the beginning rather than fixed after the fact. The company spent years designing Epic Universe and had the budget, experience, and opportunity to build the park around the realities of operating a major theme park in Central Florida. I just wish more of that planning had gone toward making reliable and weather-resistant attractions to actually experience the park appropriately.
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