Forget the long lines for the rides at Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, Florida. Nearly four years after opening, the attraction is still so popular that visitors routinely wait more than an hour just to get into a shop that sells wands.
Moving to ease the gridlock — and shower its corporate parent, NBCUniversal, with more profits — Universal Orlando Resort on Thursday unveiled details for a huge Harry Potter expansion. There will be two major new rides, eight new stores (expect a second Ollivanders wand shop) and a sprawling Leaky Cauldron restaurant, all part of a new section called Diagon Alley, one of the marquee spots in J.K. Rowling’s fiction.
A June opening is planned. Analysts estimate the cost to be US$400 million.
However, a question hangs over Hogwarts: With no new Harry Potter books from Rowling and three years having elapsed since the last Harry Potter blockbuster, can the boy wizard really power this much added theme park capacity?
Rivals like Disney and SeaWorld privately predict that the huge pop Universal got from adding Harry Potter in 2010 — a 30 percent year-on-year rise in attendance — will be followed by a much smaller bump this time. Theme park experts say Universal also faces the challenge of higher expectations among consumers. The first Harry Potter world was so compelling that it will be difficult to wow visitors a second time.
Universal is confident about its plans.
“One plus one will equal six,” Universal Creative president Mark Woodbury said of the addition of Diagon Alley to the original Wizarding World.
Alan Gilmore, an art director for the Harry Potter films who has worked closely with Universal on design, said the theming of the new section “absolutely raises the bar.”
The new area is “a maze crisscrossing itself,” as Gilmore said as he led reporters on a tour of the Diagon Alley construction site, with narrow, winding streets lined by five-story buildings and a dramatic train trestle running overhead. There is also Gringotts Wizarding Bank, replete with goblins at work, a ride plunging through its dark vaults and a fire-breathing dragon on the roof.
“We say that about the dragon, and people think we’re goofing around,” Woodbury said. “We’re not. This one blows a giant ball of fire.”
Rowling collaborated with Universal to add new elements to Diagon Alley, including a large souvenir-selling space called Carkitt Market.
As a sign of increased pressure to produce something dazzling, Universal employed 60 designers on the sequel, compared with 18 on the original.
The goal is not only to please Harry Potter fans, but to make cash registers ring. Aside from the mountain of added merchandise the resort hopes to sell, Universal Orlando — made up of two theme parks — has designed the expansion to increase the sale of more expensive multipark and multiday tickets.
Wizarding World opened in 2010 at Islands of Adventure, the newer of Universal’s two parks. Diagon Alley is located in the abutting Universal Studios. To ride the Hogwarts Express connecting the two properties, visitors must buy multipark tickets.
NBCUniversal has added attractions to its older Studios park over the past couple of years, including a Despicable Me simulator that turns riders into Minions. However, the Universal Studios property is climbing out of a deep hole created by years of underinvestment by the resort’s previous owners, the Blackstone Group and General Electric. There are still attractions themed around fading movies like Twister and characters like Betty Boop. Comcast’s NBC Universal paid US$1 billion in 2011 for full control of the resort.
Islands of Adventure has annual attendance of about 8 million; Universal Studios has a bit more than 6 million. In comparison, the Magic Kingdom at Disney World annually attracts 17.5 million guests, according to the Themed Entertainment Association.
Theme parks, while vulnerable to the economy and requiring expensive and continuous upkeep, represent one of the few areas of growth outside of cable TV for entertainment companies. For the first nine months of last year, NBCUniversal recorded US$747 million in operating cash flow, a 5.6 percent increase.
In comparison, the company’s broadcast television business had operating cash flow of US$205 million, a 23.4 percent decline, according to financial filings.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last