Let's talk about Universal Epic Universe's first year

May 22, 2026, 8:57 AM · Happy birthday today to Universal Epic Universe. America's newest theme park opened officially on May 22, 2025. The park has already cracked the top five worldwide in Theme Park Insider's annual reader poll and offers some of the best attractions in the world, including our second-rated ride in the world, Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment.

Here is my playlist of opening moments and walking tours of each of Epic's four IP lands, as well as attraction POVs and my exclusive interview with the park's creative director. It's over 90 minutes of, well, "Epic" fun.

Earlier this week, Universal Orlando invited me and a few other reporters to talk with Universal Epic Universe Vice President and General Manager Jeff Polk about the park's first year. I asked him about the design of Epic Universe and what made it unique.

"I won't say we were starting with a blank slate, but we didn't really confine ourselves to how we've always done things with, in terms of the whole park experience and the layout of the park," he said.

"There's no other park in the world that's laid out like Epic's laid out, where you've got this big central space, and then you've got these portals really taking you off to these zones. It's kind of hub-and-spoke, but there's no wagon wheel to go around the outside."

Polk also noted that Epic is designed to integrate guest services within the park, versus placing it at the front gate, as the industry has done traditionally. He also cited the design team's commitment to upgrade the restaurant experience throughout the park.

"All of those were conventions that we started kind of dabbling with in the design," he said. "Some things we tested at the existing parks before we brought them into the space at Epic to make sure they worked, including photo validation at the gates and using the pass-through lockers and things like that. Those were all born out of the Epic design process, but built into the other parks, so that we knew by the time the Epic opened, we had a technology that was proven and kind of well vetted.

"So for me, that's been probably the thing that I would like our company to carry forward - not holding ourselves to a very specific formulaic design ethos. We still want fundamental things for the guest experience, so it's consistent from park to park, but we don't necessarily need to always build things exactly the same way when we're going out to do that, because I think the stories dictate how the park should be designed, and Epic is a good representation of design supporting the story, as it should be."

Epic's unique features are beginning to have an effect on the industry, not just in Orlando, but around the world. Epic won several Thea Awards from the Themed Entertainment Association, the world's leading association of attraction and themed entertainment designers.

"We get lost in our internal level of design, and you're really focused on the task at hand and getting into the finish line," he said. "You sometimes don't realize how meaningful it might be to others that are a part of the same business or maybe in a joint adjacent business."

Epic Universe "is both impacting but also existing within this organic movement, which is more intimacy, more immediate immersion, more personal attachment to the experiences in front of you," Polk said. "This park is built to embrace that, and we're seeing it."

"People can come into the park and really feel like they're having a personalized, almost private, experience in this one-on-one interaction with Toothless, versus feeling like they're in this mass production environment where they're just one of many going past something."

But balancing intimacy with the need for capacity remains a creative challenge for any theme park.

"For now we really want to focus on what we've got in Epic in getting it right and getting it right for the largest number of guests that we can accommodate without endangering the experience, so we've been spending a lot of time being very cautious and very purposeful about how many people we let in, what type of experience we can get them," Polk said. "You always kind of run the line of very, very busy to crazy busy, and you're trying to really walk that line as much as you can. I think over the past year we've done a pretty good job of managing that along the way. It's hard because you don't know exactly what day everybody's going to show up, but the reality is the improvement that's happened over the past year - just in terms of how we've learned the business, learned the muscle memory of how to operate the business - has improved dramatically, and every day now I feel like we're better than we were yesterday, and that's the goal."

So what is next for Epic Universe?

"If you go look at the what I call the north campus parks - right where our current development is with Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure, Volcano Bay, CityWalk, the hotels, all that stuff - the site up there is about the same size as the full-size property that we have surrounding Epic," Polk said. "So, if it took 35 years to fully develop the site up there, this is a long haul proposition. It's not like you're going to go and fill up all the empty spaces tomorrow, for a number of reasons. The execution side is very difficult, because these things involve hundreds, if not thousands, of people and contractors, and lots of money. At the end of the day, you also want to leave yourself some room to continue to surprise guests and bring new stories to life over time, so that you've got them really coming back. Epic is really part of this bigger play, as you've heard many, many times, I'm sure, to make Universal Orlando Resort a full week destination, which we feel that has happened."

"We're going to leverage all of the opportunity we have within this park to deliver on the things that we fully intended to do," he said. "I think we're going to do some things in the future that'll knock your socks off."

For my weekly update of Universal and theme park news, please sign up for Theme Park Insider's weekend newsletter.

Replies (6)

This article has been archived and is no longer accepting comments.