Universal Epic Universe, Orlando, Florida, USA

Universal Epic Universe opened on May 22, 2025. With US $7 billion spent, the park is spectacular, sadly, it’s impossible to get on any of the rides without waiting in line for hours.

For those not familiar with the scale of Florida’s theme parks, they are huge. You can easily spend an entire day at the Universal Studios park. The visitor area of Epic Universe is a similar size. You may have read that at 750 acres Epic Universe is five times bigger, but most of that extra land is either the car park or for expansion.

We monitored the ride wait times on https://www.thrill-data.com/waittimes/epic-universe and it looked that times decreased in the evening. We entered the park at 5pm on May 28th 2025 and took a walk around the five different lands, each accessed by a circular portal.

The Paris-themed streets based around the Harry Potter spin-off prequel ‘Fantastic Beasts’ were by far the most impressive.

Sadly, the wait time for the only ride was a ridiculous 200 minutes – that’s three hours and twenty minutes! The single-rider lane was closed. Note that fast pass (which we didn’t have) isn’t accepted on this ride.

Other wait times were more than we were prepared to wait. For example, Mine Cart Madness 85 minutes.

Other rides were experiencing technical issues.

We decided to take a break and visit the Bar Helios at the Grand Helios Hotel. The plan was to return to Dark Universe and gamble that the Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment ride would be fixed and the line would be short. The gamble paid off and we were able to enjoy the ride. It’s a pretty good, monster-themed ride, but there are better rides in the original Universal Studios park.

With wait times still more than we’d be prepared to suffer, we left the park,

I wrote to Universal Guest Services GuestServices@universalorlando.com describing the issues and included photos of the wait times. I received a reply a few days later offering tickets for another day at Epic Universe. Not wanting to go back, I asked for tickets to the original Universal Studios park and they agreed.

We hadn’t been to the original park for several years and really enjoyed our visit. You can read why it’s still the best park here.

If you have plenty of time and a multi-day, multi-park ticket, then Epic Universe is worth a look. Otherwise, focus on other parks – a two-day, two-park pass for Universal Studios and Epic Universe would be our recommendation.

If you’re still curious about Epic Universe, the following videos created by Universal will give you an insight – obviously they don’t mention the wait times and US$35 cost for parking!

https://www.universalorlando.com/