Disney, Universal playing high-stakes poker for theme park dominance

This week's debut of Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Florida is the latest bet made by the two companies, with many more to come in the next few years.

Pull up a chair and get ready to enjoy one of the highest-stakes game of poker you’ve ever seen. Disney and Universal are pushing billions of dollars into the center of the table, and if all goes well, theme park fans will walk away as the winners.

This game has been going on for years, starting when Jay Stein and Universal Studios decided to take on Disney in Orlando. Disney responded by green-lighting a studio-themed park of its own, opening what is now known as Disney’s Hollywood Studios in 1989, one year before Universal Studios Florida debuted.

Universal added a second gate — Islands of Adventure — to its Universal Orlando Resort in 1999, the year after Walt Disney World expanded to four parks with its Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Universal continued to lag Disney until 2010, when the challenger found its own brand of magic by opening The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Islands of Adventure.

And that is when this game of corporate poker got interesting.

Harry Potter didn’t just save the Universal theme parks, transfiguring them into a cash cow for Universal’s owner, Comcast. Like a Legilimency spell, The Wizarding World got into Disney management’s head. That many fans and critics (including yours truly) called Universal’s Wizarding World the world’s best theme park land challenged Disney’s pride as the undisputed decades-long leader in themed entertainment business.

So after years of work and billions of dollars, Disney has countered with Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. But the Galaxy’s Edge that Disneyland fans have been visiting all summer and fall isn’t the final project. Disney fans in Florida are seeing that for the first time this week, as Walt Disney World opens Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance — the ambitious new dark ride that anchors the land. (Rise of the Resistance will open at Disneyland on Jan. 17.)

Of course, Universal will see Disney’s new Star Wars ride and raise. Universal Studios Hollywood has torn down the old Globe Theatre and is replacing it with what looks like a five-story city block of Manhattan apartments that will house a massive new Secret Life of Pets dark ride. But the big project at Universal is Super Nintendo World, an entire land themed to the world’s most famous video game brand.

The first installation of that opens in Japan this summer, but Universal Studios Hollywood’s version of a real-life Mario Kart ride is now under construction on its Lower Lot.

Disney will see Universal’s Nintendo project and raise with Marvel, offering a new Avengers-themed land under construction at Disney California Adventure. A Spider-Man ride will open late next year, but the big bid comes with a Wakanda E-ticket attraction after that. Disneyland also is bringing the new Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway ride from Disney’s Hollywood Studios to Disneyland’s Toontown in 2022.

Yet even Mickey can’t stop the bidding. In 2023, Universal will open its new Epic Universe theme park in Orlando, providing a new collection of attractions that the company might duplicate in Hollywood.

Unlike in a casino, though, neither Disney nor Universal needs to lose this game of poker … so long as fans keep coming up with the money to visit both parks.