So today on the podcast, Epic Universe. When I initially envisioned today's episode, I thought a discussion

of Epic as one section of our main news update. And then once I was in the park last month, I thought,

no, no, it's more of a standalone topic. And by the time I started to pull together how I thought

this park would change the

dynamic between Disney and Universal in Florida, I simply came to the point where I realized

there were multiple topics here and to explore them fully and to chart out how this likely

changes the Florida theme park landscape while also talking about the

park itself would probably take a couple of episodes and so that's what we have here

today and also next week and so with that we've got a lot to cover and we're just

going to jump into it all.

So a couple weeks ago, in April I went over to Epic Universe and saw the park during technical previews. I should say up front that not everything was working when I was

there, most notably the battle for the Ministry of Magic Attraction, which has been having some

reliability issues. I've heard this pertains mostly to the AA figures. The other headliner

Dark Ride, Monsters Unchained, was up and working

but was also having issues with AA figures freezing up. But this is exactly what technical

rehearsals are for to identify bugs with an extremely limited audience and then to fix them before the park opens to the general public.

I was there a month before its opening date, so there's a reasonable amount of time to work through any of these issues.

Here I mostly want to frame our discussion today as to how does this park change the competitive

landscape in Florida between Universal and Disney over the long haul. For the next two years,

advantage clearly goes to Universal. They have brand new attractions, some of them extremely impressive, while Disney does not.

In the business of theme parks, new attractions are always the largest driver of attendance.

On Disney's side, as we've talked about over the last few years, none of the new attractions forthcoming, such as those

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