Universal Orlando Plans Expansion at All 3 Parks & Endorses “Rising Tides” Theory

During the Bank of America 2025 Media & Entertainment Conference, Universal Parks CEO Mark Woodbury discussed expansion plans for all three Universal Orlando theme parks, how Epic Universe is grabbing market share from Walt Disney World, and endorsed the “rising tides lift all ships” thesis that’s been advanced by Disney executives. It was a wide-ranging interview that also discussed projects in Texas, Nevada, Japan, China, Hollywood and the United Kingdom, but we’re going to focus on Florida.

This is a particularly interesting interview because it comes at the end of Epic Universe’s opening season, and offers far greater depth than Comcast’s recent earnings call. By any reasonable account, it’s been an up-and-down summer for Universal Orlando. As discussed in our 2025 Epic Universe Crowd Calendar a couple months ago and more recently in Epic Universe Ticket Trickery & Crowd Changes, wait times have been through the roof at the new park…despite relatively low park capacity and attendance.

On the one hand, our top post about the new park is Why You Should Skip Epic Universe. Our advice for the majority of tourists is to stay on the sidelines and wait until Epic Universe improves its operations and efficiency, which likely means avoiding the park until 2026. On the other hand, I followed my own advice about picking days wisely for the new park, and just enjoyed an Excellent Experience at Epic Universe, notching 20+ attractions in one day. And I easily could’ve done more had I not spent so much time eating and taking photos.

I was particularly curious about the Bank of America interview because Mark Woodbury is as an interesting executive. He became Universal’s theme park chief in 2022, and set his sights on lifting Universal out of Disney’s shadow after the theme parks had become a surprise growth engine for NBCUniversal. “How do we become the destination of choice in each of the markets that we operate in and in all of the markets that we choose to expand into?” he said during an interview with NYT earlier this year.

This is not hyperbole. Universal is in the midst of unprecedented expansion, even aside from Epic Universe. The company opened another fully-fledged theme park, Universal Studios Beijing, just a few years ago. In addition to Epic Universe, the Florida complex has debuted several hotels and new attractions in recent years.

With regard to Epic Universe, Woodbury wants families to view the Universal Orlando Resort as a weeklong destination and not just a 1-2 day add-on to a Disney vacation. Universal clearly has high hopes for Epic Universe, sees ample opportunities for further growth of its theme park business, and will continue to move aggressively to capture more market share from Disney (something that has already happened in the last decade).

Here are a few key comments from Woodbury during the Bank of America Media Conference. First, on the guest reception to Epic Universe since it opened, what’s gone right and wrong:

“Results have been really strong. [Epic Universe is] doing exactly what we wanted to do in terms of driving incremental attendance to the resort as a whole and the performance on per caps, very strong since we opened the doors. You can see it in merchandise, you see it in the food offerings, a lot of great creative work went into both of those.”

“It’s not without challenges when you open an entire theme park at once. When you take the technology that we deliver, even on the stand-alone attractions, it’s always a little complicated to get it to ramp up to full speed. And we’re in the process of doing that now, nothing that we didn’t expect. So we’re very pleased with how things are shaping out.”

For what it’s worth, this is completely consistent with Comcast’s most recent quarterly earnings report. Here are a couple of executive quotes from the call transcript:

“We expect Epic to continue to scale over the course of the year, with higher attendance and per caps as well as significantly improved operating leverage.”

“As expected, our near-term focus is on expanding ride throughput to reduce early attendance constraints. Epic is trending in line with our expectations and well on its way to transforming Universal Orlando into a true week-long destination.”

I view this as a positive that high-level leadership is cognizant of the operational woes, and they’re going to continue finding ways to increase attendance while also improving operational efficiency. This is reassuring, and indicates even executives realize that they can’t simply pack the park–the reliability needs to first improve. I appreciate that.

Woodbury was next asked about his top 3 priorities for the next 12 to 18 months to cement Universal Orlando as a longer duration vacation destination. Here was his response:

“When you look at what we’re focused on, this business is really driven by creating a pipeline of great product, and telling the world that you have it with breakthrough marketing. Most importantly, delivering it with world-class service across the board to create that awareness, create that intent to revisit. That’s number one; continue to drive that.”

“Two, get the message out to throughout the U.S., continue to drive awareness, continue to drive share of voice and continue to drive business to the marketplace. And we think that we’ll see [Universal Orlando] continue to grow visitation to the market as well as take market share in the process.”

When asked a follow up as to whether Epic Universe will lift the overall Orlando market or shift market share to Universal: “We think both. We will drive incremental visits to the market and will drive share shift. And we’re seeing that in the first 2-3 months of operations.”

Comments like this grab headlines because people don’t understand what market share means. This is not really as noteworthy as it might sound. In fact, we discussed exactly this topic back in 2023: Attendance Increases As Walt Disney World Loses Market Share to Universal Orlando.

Earlier this year, Disney CFO Hugh Johnston conceded that Universal would likely gain market share on Disney, but it wouldn’t matter because both will benefit from category growth. Meaning that Disney will have a proportionately smaller piece of the pie…but that it won’t matter, because it’s a bigger pie.

This should be fairly self-evident, but in case not, Universal is pretty much guaranteed to gain market share by virtue of adding a third theme park. So long as the attendance gains are not completely cannibalizing the existing Universal Orlando parks (and they aren’t) and the overall attendance growth is disproportionate to Universal and not Disney (almost assuredly also true), Universal gains market share. But both can see attendance growth, even as Disney loses share.

This is similar to Orange County attributing record-setting occupancy tax collections to Epic Universe. Yes, of course that happened. Filling more hotel rooms is what increases the potential occupancy tax pool–and Universal just opened three new ones, thereby increasing the county’s total room inventory!

This doesn’t somehow hurt Disney. To the contrary, Walt Disney World’s occupancy percentage also increased during the same timeframe (as reported during the most recent earnings call). Epic Universe got the credit, but both Disney and Universal contributed to the record. Disney was responsible for more of it, but probably also lost hotel market share at the same time.

The point is that the success of one doesn’t have to come at the expense of the other. It may come at no one’s expense thanks to category growth; or it may come at the expense of smaller-scale Orlando offerings that can’t keep up.

Woodbury was asked later in the Q&A if he eventually expects a more even attendance split with Disney. Here’s his response:

“Our chief competitor, Disney, is a strong competitor. They’re going to be investing pretty heavily in the market, too. I think it’s a case of all ships rise with the tide, will both drive audience to the marketplace, and we’ll be able to take our share of that.”

There it is, the rising tides lift all ships theory, just stated a bit differently. This is something Disney leadership has stated repeatedly, and history bears it out with the opening of past parks as well as the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, after which both operators saw attendance increases.

I do think there’s more nuance and limits to this theory, as the average American vacation duration is shrinking and international visitors with long holidays don’t account for enough of the attendance mix. But it’s fairly undeniable that new parks and lands draw new visitors to Central Florida who then do other things. This is especially true when the expansion is oriented around IP with a passionate fanbase who may otherwise not have visited theme parks (Harry Potter, Nintendo).

Probably the most interesting portion of the Q&A came when Woodbury was asked about the potential for Epic Universe expansion, including a sixth Wicked world. Here’s his response:

I stirred the pot when I saw the Wicked sets and said it was a theme park waiting to happen. If you fly over Epic Universe or look at Google Earth, you’ll see how we planned the park [with] greenfield space between the existing worlds. And that is strategically positioned to give us flexibility to expand a world or create a new world.”

“I don’t have anything to announce…but I can tell you that there are multiple attractions in the works, not just at Epic Universe. When you have the 3 parks, the cadence of product delivery across the resort to continue to drive [attendance] is really a key part of our strategy going forward.”

“We have a clear line of sight into how far we can take this. It’s considerable. And we have a pretty sophisticated and well-thought-through long-range plan that takes us out another decade in terms of product offerings, not just in Orlando but around the world.”

“When you are trying to drive that full-week destination over the long term, which Epic is, it’s a long-term play. You’ve got to have a strong pipeline of continuing to bring new [attractions] to the marketplace.”

Our Commentary

This sentiment doesn’t surprise me in the least. Every interview with Woodbury suggests a thirst for aggressive expansion. Universal theme park leadership saying this doesn’t mean it’ll happen, but it’s a fascinating window into his thought process and ambitions. However, it’s still early in the ballgame for Epic Universe, and it’s unclear whether the new theme park is living up to Comcast executive and investor expectations.

This is not about whether fans like it or if Universal executives do a public victory lap. It comes down to how Wall Street and Comcast feel about the near and medium-term ROI. Keep in mind that they just dropped a reported $7 billion on a new theme park, and they might want to recoup some of that before dumping more money into the gate.

Of course it’s expected to be driving food & beverage and merchandise sales, higher per guest spending, and stealing market share from Disney. All of those are givens. But $7 billion is a lot of money, and those givens do not equal financial success.

When it comes to Universal, there are also questions about the projects in Texas, Las Vegas, Great Britain, and other existing gates. All can factor in to Comcast’s future investment in Universal Orlando. Of course, there’s also the broader economy. Epic Universe could be far exceeding investor expectations, but if there were another black swan event (e.g. Great Recession or COVID), some of those plans would be put on ice.

Conversely, the economy might heat up and consumers could continue their strong spending on travel. Comcast could see the writing on the wall with its legacy businesses and underperformance of Peacock, comparative overperformance of its ‘destinations’ business, and decide to go all-in on theme parks.

Suffice to say, what Universal is planning today could end up being very different based on how the first year or two goes with Epic Universe. I’m not suggesting a preemptive cutback–I’m saying that the range of outcomes is still unknown. Ambitions could be scaled down…or ramped up. Both are possible! 

This is an unpopular opinion, but Epic Universe’s ride roster actually seems strong to me. I’ve seen a lot of complaints about this–mostly from guests visiting on “bad” days when wait times are all 60+ minutes–but I think that operational inefficiency is a big driver of this.

Epic Universe has a pretty robust ride roster for a new theme park in the post-Euro Disneyland era. The only recent exception to this has been Shanghai Disneyland, which was an anomaly. Expansion at Epic Universe also strikes me as a good ‘problem’ to have, as it’ll most likely be needed due to demand (similar to what we’re seeing at Magic Kingdom).

While some questionable decisions were made with the number of outdoor attractions, the fact of the matter is that Epic Universe has more attractions than Animal Kingdom today, over two decades after it opened. Epic Universe does have plenty of expansion pads between its worlds, and I suspect at least one of those will be put to use before 2030.

Redevelopment at the two existing gates, especially Universal Studios Florida, is imperative. Not a good problem to have–just a problem.

Whenever fans hype up Epic Universe and claim that it’s going to be what puts Universal Orlando over the top to claim Walt Disney World’s throne, I can’t help but wonder when they last visited Universal Studios Florida. To describe several of its lands as in need of refreshes would be an understatement. Dino-Rama or Animation Courtyard–two lands in the process of replacement–would be right at home in USF.

Universal Studios Florida has received a couple of placemaking projects in recent years, neither of which are anything special. Incremental improvements accomplished quickly and cheaply, so at least there’s that. Islands of Adventure is generally in better shape with a great ride roster and superior placemaking, but similar criticisms could be levied at that park, too.

To put it bluntly, there are areas of both parks that feel rundown. Honestly, it’s to the point that I wonder whether we’ll look back in another decade and question the wisdom of building Epic Universe as opposed to saving infrastructure costs, fixing and expanding USF and IoA. Probably not, since theme park fans love new gates even if it means the existing ones get neglected. (See also, Walt Disney World fans’ desire for a 5th gate despite Animal Kingdom’s lackluster lineup.)

The issue that Universal Orlando has is that Epic Universe is fantastic, and makes the two existing theme parks look worse by comparison. Just last week, I spent nearly 2 full days at USF and IoA, followed by Epic Universe. It was like going from the All Stars to Wilderness Lodge.

We already know that Rip Ride Rockit is being replaced, and Universal has wasted no time getting started on demolition of that. There are rumors that Springfield is next on the chopping block, to be replaced by a Pokémon-themed area.

Without knowing anything or having any insider connections, my guess is that Universal Orlando will build new Nintendo attractions in each of the existing parks, as opposed to building in the Epic Universe expansion pad adjacent to Donkey Kong Country. Nintendo is going to be the marquee draw that gets families booking trips to Orlando, so Universal might as well borrow a page from its own Harry Potter playbook and spread Nintendo out among all 3 gates.

It’s also our understanding that Universal Orlando intends upon returning to its cadence of an annual new major opening. This is consistent with recent precedent prior to Epic Universe, several executive interviews and earnings calls. It’s also what Walt Disney World will be doing once again starting in 2027.

There’s every reason to believe the competitors will adopt a similar approach. Epic Universe will be the marketable draw in Central Florida for a couple of years, but Universal obviously doesn’t want their pipeline running dry as Disney starts bringing new attractions and lands online.

If all goes according to plan and expectations, the next decade-plus should see a revival of the theme park wars in Orlando, with both Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando guests being the biggest winners of all! We can’t wait to watch this unfold, and look forward to enjoying the ride as both compete for guest dollars and attendance.

Need trip planning tips and comprehensive advice for your visit to Central Florida? Make sure to read our Universal Orlando Planning Guide for everything about Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios Florida. Also check out our Walt Disney World Vacation Planning Guide for everything about those parks, resorts, restaurants, and so much more.

Your Thoughts

What do you think of the ambitious plans for additions at Universal Orlando? Expect it’ll be full steam ahead on expansion and redevelopment at Epic Universe, Islands of Adventure, and Universal Studios Florida? Do you agree or disagree with our assessment about the need for new attractions and refreshed areas at the two existing gates? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback—even when you disagree with us—is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!