I just read this article over at Attractions magazine about Universal Studios expanding The Wizarding World of Harry Potter to two of their other parks out in California and Tokyo. Some people are excited about this, thinking that it will allow even more people to experience this amazingly designed attraction, but I guess I didn’t exactly share that same sentiment from what I read…
To me, this sounds like just another example of the same problem I see with Disney right now where they’ve been developing attractions for multiple parks around the world at the same time. Sure, it may end up being cheaper for them to re-use the Imagineering efforts rather than creating unique experiences for their other parks, but from my perspective, what’s the incentive for me to visit any of those other parks if I’ve already experienced the same things here in Florida?!
The reasoning might simply be that they’re just not targeting me with these efforts – for all I know, maybe they assume that guests aren’t going to visit multiple parks so it’s not a big deal if they duplicate efforts, but it does bother someone like me who is a huge fan of pretty much everything they do and as such, wants to eventually experience all of the Disney theme parks around the world! When I look back a couple of years ago at when we visited Disneyland for our anniversary, the ones that really stood out to me weren’t Toy Story Mania or the Tower of Terror or even the ones that started first in California and got transplanted in Florida like Soarin’ and a big chunk of the original Disneyland attractions … it was the attractions like Aladdin and The Matterhorn and The World of Color that were truly unique to the California parks made a lasting impression on me because they were new experiences that I’d never seen before.
Maybe you can get away with it in smaller spurts here or there, but entire lands just seems really excessive. What will make Universal Orlando’s version of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter stand out when all is said and done, other than it was the first one???