As if foretold by the stars, it has arrived… the first major theme park in the U.S. in nearly a quarter of a century is here. Universal Epic Universe is meant to be the park that finally shifts the gravity in Central Florida for good, establishing Universal’s now three-park, eleven-hotel property as more than a side trip from Disney World, but a destination in its own right. Epic Universe brings with it big brands, big attractions, and a 21st century mindset that has otherwise come to Disney and Universal as piecemeal, land-sized expansions; never as an all-at-once new gate with the all the ambition and audacity of a greenfield project.
But now, it exists. And that’s the first step to get where we theme park fans really want to end up: “armchair Imagineering.” It’s a time honored tradition to basically throw away the rules, budgets, and realities that confine the actual park and begin to imagine what you’d do if you were in charge. And with a fresh park to play with, we have quite a bit of room to work our way toward a full, imagined “build-out” of what Epic Universe could be…
Image: Universal
If you’ve been around here long, maybe you’ve seen my hand-drawn maps or read in-depth “walkthroughs” of my similarly-dreamy build-outs of Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Animal Kingdom, and Islands of Adventure. But this one is unique. Epic Universe is brand new, with lots of room and want to grow and – critically – the expansion pads to make it happen. So inspired as always by the work of S. W. Wilson at Ideal Build-Out, I’m setting off again on a walkthrough of a reimagined and expanded theme park.
Worth noting: this is my far the longest feature I’ve ever posted here on Park Lore – so much so that editing the full feature crashed my browser, necessitating a two-part walkthrough. So here are some specific links should you wish to skip to the action (which I don’t recommend because why did I write 20,000 words if you’re just gonna skip them?!):
For those sticking it out and joining me for the “Full Circle Tour,” the journey begins with an origin story that’ll shape our final product…
Epic Origins
Image: Universal
For most of us, the very existence of Epic Universe feels like a multiversal fluke.
After all, it’s not every decade that a new, destination theme park opens in North America. (The last was Disney California Adventure in 2001, twenty-four years ago.) For perfectly logical reasons, big name operators have shifted their focus from the super-saturated market of the U.S. Why build here when you can build in China (offering a population four times that of America) and when the Middle East will write a blank check to license your brand in perpetuity?
Yep, for us U.S. theme park aficionados, it’s been a multi-decade realization that we’d had it good for a good long time, and now we’d watch as major players instead turned their attention to untapped markets and lucrative international licensing deals. From Disney resorts in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi to Universal properties in Singapore and Beijing, there was a sense that most of us would only visit major, ambitious, from-scratch projects through YouTube, wading through comments begging Disney and Universal to clone the best of those international parks’ rides back home.
Then came a plot twist no one saw coming.
Image: Google, modifications by Park Lore
To make a long story short, Universal Orlando had actually had very aggressive plans for the Orlando market at the end of the 20th century. Though their 1999 second gate, Islands of Adventure, would technically fill the park-sized expansion plot adjoining their original Universal Studios Florida, Universal had also cobbled together sizable landholdings just south of their core property, upon which they expected to build parks three and four – and in surprisingly short order. The ambitious idea then was that by the 2010s, Universal would be operating four full-sized theme parks (matching Disney World) just in a compact, urban resort split between a “North” and “South” complex with the tourism-fueled International Drive between.
However, the infamous flubbing of Islands of Adventure’s opening saw momentum slam to a halt. Coinciding with a period in the early 2000s when Universal was briefly owned by a French conglomerate called Vivendi, Universal retracted. In 2003, a cash-strapped and over-expanded Vivendi determined that Universal Orlando had no need for the 1,800 acres of undeveloped land they were holding onto as some sort of pipe dream of rivaling Disney. Vivendi sold all 1,800 acres for a meager $70 million before turning around a year later and selling most of their stake in Universal, anyway.
Majority control of Universal (and its theme parks) passed to General Electric, who combined it with their separately-acquired NBC, creating “NBCUniversal”.
Image: Comcast
Then, in 2009, GE turned around and sold a 51% stake in the new media conglomerate to an even more unlikely owner – cable and communications giant Comcast. Primarily known for TV & Internet service (and terrible customer service), Comcast seemed an unlikely owner for the television-movie media conglomerate of NBCU. Industry analysts expected Comcast to basically strip the entertainment giant for parts, maybe retaining NBC and its cable networks while spinning off or selling off non-core assets (like the movie studios, production companies, and theme parks) to the highest bidder.
But as luck would have it, the deep-pocketed, recession-proof (and later, pandemic-proof!) Comcast came into ownership of the parks just as the Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Diagon Alley opened, cementing the “Living Land” formula as the de facto form of themed entertainment in the 21st century and – incidentally – printing money.
Image: Universal
In 2014, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told analysts, “We’re doubling down on theme parks. We think there is a lot of ‘there’ there in the theme park business for many years to come […] We have a low market share – and only one way to go.” In the same breath, he noted that while Universal had over 4,200 hotel rooms in Orlando at the time, evaluation suggested the resort could support as many as 15,000.
There’s no question that Comcast “put its money where its mouth is,” absolutely supercharging Universal Parks with billions of dollars in investment, gargantuan licensing deals, and tremendous momentum – including (in Orlando alone) Transformers: The Ride, Springfield, Race Through New York, Volcano Bay, Reign of Kong, Hagrid’s Motorbike Adventure, VelociCoaster, and the Bourne Stuntacular. Between 2010 and 2020, Universal Orlando expanded from three on-site hotels to eight.
Image: Orlando ParkStop
But one of Comcast’s more intriguing moves was one of the least talked-about. In 2016, Comcast quietly bought back 475 acres (about a third of the land Vivendi had sold fifteen years earlier) for $130 million, setting the stage for something big…
As far back as 2018, the “Permit Princess” herself – the one and only Alicia Stella of Orlando ParkStop – was hard at work uncovering evidence that Comcast was eager to use that land: filing paperwork, moving earth, and removing the hazardous remnants of the property’s former occupant (defense contractor Lockheed), all in service of drafting plans for a third theme park meant to occupy the regained “South Complex” – a park then rumored to be called Universal’s Fantastic Worlds.
Images: Universal
In Universal’s typical “worst-kept-secret” M.O., anyone who wanted to know could be several steps ahead of any official communication for at least several months. But finally, in August 2019 (at a fairly innocuous press conference and with literally zero details around its contents) Comcast and NBCUniversal officials finally conveyed aloud their intent to open a new theme park in Orlando with the name Universal’s Epic Universe. A first major development on their re-acquired land, the park would represent Comcast’s largest-ever (and first from-scratch) investment in the theme park business and – in the words of CEO Roberts – “reflect the tremendous excitement we have for the future of our theme park business.”
It’s been a long road since then – peppered continuously with staggeringly accurate discoveries and predictions from Alicia and practically-daily aerial updates from the legendary @bioreconstruct – but on May 22, 2025, it officially became real…
Universal Foundations
Image: Universal
All said and done, Universal Epic Universe ended up looking… well… a lot like Alicia Stella had divined through document filings, site plans, and patent registrations across the last decade! It’s made of five lands (or, in Epic Universe’s parlance, “worlds”): Celestial Park; How To Train Your Dragon: Isle of Berk; Dark Universe (themed to Universal’s cinematic, classic Monsters); The Wizarding World of Harry Potter: Ministry of Magic (a third land-sized Potter outing), and the long-awaited Orlando debut of Super Nintendo World.
If we call the existence of Epic Universe a multiversal fluke, then surely its contents are, too. By being born all at once into the themed entertainment industry of the 2020s, Epic Universe is a park with deeply embedded technologies, master-planned and interconnected systems, tremendously cutting-edge (and so far, operationally finicky) ride systems, and what can only be described as “best-in-class” facilities with a “new paint” smell still permeating. But for our purposes, it’s worth analyzing some of the foundational components of Epic Universe that make it unique, and that we ought to preserve or at least consider as we begin to build-out the park…
1. Beyond the blockbusters
First, this is one of only two “non-Studio” parks in the Universal collection. Of the seven Universal theme parks that exist, five are called “Universal Studios” (Hollywood, Orlando, Osaka, Singapore, and Beijing) and their contents reflect that. Though each clearly carries the “DNA” of industry best practices at the time it was designed, they all – inherently – elevate Universal movie intellectual property to the forefront and then swap it out continuously to ensure it’s fresh, finger-on-the-pulse, and serving as studio synergy.
In other words, the “Studio” parks broadly contain some combination of spaces dedicated to Hollywood, New York, Jurassic Park or World, Minions, Fast & Furious, Transformers, Shrek, and the licensed Harry Potter – as they should! If all of Universal needs distilled into a single park, you’d expect those “ambassador” franchises to rise to the top of decision-making.
Image: Universal
Given that those “anchor, core IPs” are already checked off by way of Universal Studios Florida, Epic Universe gives Universal Creative the opportunity to do what it has only had the chance to do once before, ever (via Islands of Adventure): to think outside the box (office). As a result, Epic Universe serves as a second go-round at developing fantastical environments in a way that existed for decades as the exclusive domain of Disney Imagineering and assembling a creative collection of intellectual properties that don’t necessarily have to be temporal tie-ins and brand-ambassador franchises (No Minions! No Fast & Furious! No Jurassic Park!).
Then comes the unique task of reverse engineering an umbrella aesthetic to make sense of the collection…
2. Finding the frame
Image: bioreconstruct, Twitter
Fans still debate whether Islands of Adventure intentionally set out to be a “literary” park or if it just sort of fell together that way, but the effect is the same. What would read on paper as a somewhat random collection of licensed and owned IPs gains coherence by way of the “Islands of Adventure” name and the strong branding around it – compasses and lighthouses and “islands” and bridges. From Port of Entry on, every element builds the subtext we need: that we’re adventuring between stories, delving into the hyper-saturated panels of comic books, Sunday funnies, ancient mythological tales, picture books… the context compounds until even Jurassic Park and Harry Potter read as fantastical novels – a totally different “frame” than the same spaces have in “Studio” parks. It’s powerful, even if it’s passive.
Epic Universe does the same by establishing a “cosmic” frame – an astrolabe logo, astrological imagery, and the insistence that its sub-sections aren’t lands, they’re worlds. But it goes one further! If Islands of Adventure’s frame story is passive, then Epic Universe’s is… well… if not active, than at least passively pervasive. Thanks to the recurring motif of literal portals that connect us to the park’s lands worlds, there’s an unignorable sense of something larger going on here, reinforced by the park’s icon (the towering “Chronos” – an art nouveau kinetic mechanism that’s channeling the multiversal energies that power those portals). That framing device is further strengthened by the park’s real defining and innovative features…
Read on…!
