Another good point. Experience time does not matter much in a vacuum--Tower is under 4 minutes and I still do not think WDI has beaten that stateside (grim to think about). But in the context of it replacing what was once a 45 minute show, even though it was not a huge draw, it's not great.
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News Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind attraction confirmed for Epcot
- Thread starter wdwmagic
- Start date
Purduevian
Well-Known Member
I think a family thrill ride was exactly what EPCOT needed. With Test track and MS orange being the only "thrill" ride in the park.
MK has the 3 mountains, DHS has RnRC, TOT, and Slinky, AK has Everest and Dinosaur
FerretAfros
Well-Known Member
Of course the goal was going to be missed: reskinning an already-popular attraction will never result in sustained attendance growth.
While DCA's Tower of Terror never quite reached the popularity of WDW's, it was still one of the park's headliners. It was only a walk-on during the earliest and latest hours of normal park operations; otherwise all seats were being filled all day long. The ride really didn't have a surplus of capacity that was going unused, so there's really nowhere for the ridership to grow. Whether guests are waiting 15 minutes or 60, only a certain number of people can ride it during a single day.
Similarly, the Pixar Pier project overhauled the already-popular Paradise Pier attractions by slapping familiar characters on them. It added a couple snack kiosks, but otherwise only dealt with aesthetic changes. The attractions (especially California Screamin' and Midway Mania) were already popular, and rarely sent out empty seats. A few years after the project opened, the area is about as popular as it was before. Which of course makes sense, as once again the previous design didn't have excess capacity.
My understanding is that Mission:Breakout was done "inexpensively" (by WDI standards) for somewhere in the $40-60M ballpark; I believe Pixar Pier was $225-250M. Between the two projects, they spent around $300M on the park and added literally no capacity other than a couple ODV snack stands. The short-term attendance bumps associated with both projects are most similar to typically-inexpensive seasonal promotions and holiday decor, not permanent modifications to the park.
On the flip side, the Universe of Energy is a great example of something that could have benefitted from being redressed into a new attraction. It struggled to fill even half of its seats, and provided a unique (and long!) attraction experience. Instead, they're completely replacing it with a rollercoaster that presumably has middling hourly throughput. And while Cosmic Rewind may average higher ridership than Energy did in its final years, it will never come close to its total capacity, providing a nice "emergency release valve" for when crowd levels in the park got too high. They're spending about half-a-billion dollars, and the end result will be an attraction with a smaller capacity and far shorter ride time.
Not only does WDI require outrageous budgets for anything they touch, but their projects seldom provide meaningful improvements to the parks they're in. It's no wonder that new things are built so frequently, when the return on investment is so unbalanced.
No Name
Well-Known Member
And then Lasseter was gone a couple months later anyway. And now they’ve announced they’re making a big-budget Tower of Terror movie.
doctornick
Well-Known Member
I don’t disagree with what you are saying, but for thoroughness will point out that Pixar Pier did add the Emotional Whirlwind spinner. (Of course that was only basically a displaced ride from A Bugs Land closing.)
yensidtlaw1969
Well-Known Member
I can agree that, on paper, EPCOT was due a thrill ride.
But I think, holistically speaking, EPCOT has many, other issues that should be due for addressing before the lack of a short, Roller Coaster-style thrill ride.
The park is broken - Cosmic Rewind is a band aid, and an insanely expensive one. $450 Million is enough money to fix all the ails of the front half of the park, if only they had a genuine vision for what that should be. Instead we get one (x1) coaster out of it? When Expedition: Everest cost $100 Million and Rise of the Resistance was like $250-300 Mil?
This money should be going WAY further than this ride is gonna take it.
I believe $450MM was the number thrown out for Shanghai Pirates. Is this really going to match that?
Epcot really just needs another good 15 minute attraction eating about 3000+ people an hour. Obviously this isn't it.
Patcheslee
Well-Known Member
I finally figured out why this is so expensive. To keeping with themeing, Disney decided to apply the NASA prices. i.e. hammer lol
Brer Oswald
Well-Known Member
Didn’t they also spend millions on the unnecessary barges? They sure know how to waste money.
They should have dug up the mountain coaster concepts for World Showcase. Probably could have built both under 450 million, and they would have been just as popular as the Guardians coaster.
tommyhawkins
Well-Known Member
its probably around 3 and half minutes to 4 minutes, but could deliver an operational hourly throughput of around 2050/hr
Which is an exceptional capacity for a single track coaster, especially at Disney. The price tag is clearly related to this capacity with, two show buildings, over a mile of train and multiple trains to go with it. it doesnt take a rocket scientist to work out where the money went.
I do find the rhetoric weird that because they had boring long winded rides , that that is what should be going back in the park, when clearly no one was going to them otherwise theyd be open now. Their main competitor is building groundbreaking rides and its like many of you want them to be a boring museum that never does anything different other than lousy ideas that never made if off the drawing board in [whichever decade you went to disney as a child] .
They spent money on Barges they needed for a show, im not sure how that is wasteful.
Yes, sadly at least 10 months at this stage, showing very few signs it will be done earlier than 2023
Brer Oswald
Well-Known Member
You kind of have to address the issues of the park to understand why it wasn’t a good use of funds. Epcot has routinely struggled with attracting guests in the daytime. On the flip side, it’s been widely accepted that the main strength of the park is the vast amount of dining options available in World Showcase, which guests tend to indulge in at night.
So, rather than allocate funds to add or improve attractions, attracting guests to visit in the daytime, they spent millions to replace a successful show in an effort to attract more guests at the time of day that the park already was at its strongest in terms of attendance.
If they wanted a new show for whatever reason, they could’ve just simply designed something that was less expensive. Dumping millions into something that won’t push the needle is pretty darn wasteful, especially when the park already has a laundry list of issues that likely won’t get addressed now.
No Name
Well-Known Member
It still doesn’t really add up. Regional amusement parks build entire coasters for mere tens of millions so there’s no reason the buildings, track length, capacity, etc. infrastructure-wise should be driving up the cost to record heights. Disney has always built separate stations, and Everest has similarly high capacity. I have to imagine more of the cost was sunk into developing the technology and show scenes or lost somewhere else along the process. If it’s the bones of the ride, then that’s extra troubling.
UNCgolf
Well-Known Member
Well, they were far more entertaining than any roller coaster, so boring is a weird way to describe them. They also likely had more people ride them every day than most roller coasters ever do. They were very popular originally -- the content became outdated and that's why they lost popularity; it had nothing to do with length. No one is suggesting the exact same rides should still exist (since the content was outdated, as I said), but that certainly doesn't mean they couldn't build similarly long, interesting attractions as a replacement.
Also, I think the only groundbreaking ride Universal has built in a decade+ is Forbidden Journey. That's not to suggest what they're building is bad (although some of it has been -- just like Disney), but it's not groundbreaking.
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yensidtlaw1969
Well-Known Member
Wanting the front half of the park to have more than a combined 45 minutes of ride time automatically means I want the park to become a museum?
I can want Disney to be building longer attractions than they are without insisting they reconstruct everything they closed - which I think you'll find is actually how most people who lament the loss of the Future World classics feel. It's not about restoration, it's about genuinely improving. Mission: Space wasn't a fair trade for Horizons, and if they were going to close Horizons then they should have built something that was. Groundbreaking and long need not be mutually exclusive.
If you knew your EPCOT Center history you'd know that those rides were not closed because they were boring, which really is a myth. Most of the early Future World attractions were shuttered because they had sponsors who paid for attractions to be built at rarely seen scales in terms of building, ride systems, capacity, and show elements, and once the sponsors left Disney wasn't interested in maintaining many of those expensive pieces on their own dime. So they replaced them with shorter, less unique, and less expensive attractions. The park's critical and financial peak was in the early 90's, and was most popular in its lifetime when most of these attractions were still intact, so it doesn't really bear out that they were closed because people didn't like them - the park has never done as well since they left.
So, if you find the rhetoric weird, maybe it's because that's not actually how anyone sees it but you.
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No Name
Well-Known Member
People wanted a greater variety of rides. Anyone who thinks most people would’ve wanted World of Motion over Test Track is lying to themselves or out of touch with reality. Yeah, Disney had a number of misfires after that, but most of those were backed by sponsors who also saw the market for more active, thrilling rides.
Additionally @yensidtlaw1969 , attendance rose throughout the mid 90s until 1998, the year Animal Kingdom opened, and fell proportionately with MK and DHS. The attendance numbers don’t really support the argument.
Additionally @yensidtlaw1969 , attendance rose throughout the mid 90s until 1998, the year Animal Kingdom opened, and fell proportionately with MK and DHS. The attendance numbers don’t really support the argument.
UNCgolf
Well-Known Member
If the people who prefer Test Track were going to go to Disney anyways, and the people who prefer rides like World of Motion stop going because Disney eliminated them, then that's a mistake because you've lost customers. Looking at individual rides in a vacuum isn't all that useful when it comes to overall theme park business.
I'm not saying that actually happened -- I'm merely pointing out that more people wanting a certain type of ride doesn't necessarily inform the proper strategy to maximize business. There are plenty of people who would like it if Disney tore down most of their rides and replaced them with roller coasters, but you wouldn't find many people who think that would be a smart decision.
Personally speaking, I've been to Disney twice in the past decade, and the second time was mainly because my GF wanted to go. If something closer to original EPCOT still existed, full of those kinds of rides and activities, I would absolutely go to Disney more often.
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Casper Gutman
Well-Known Member
I seriously doubt your assessment. Test Track was and is a fun but lackluster ride, with a weak premise and show section and mediocre, brief thrill component. WoM was a witty, cartoon-y AA-heavy ride akin to Pirates. I suspect you could find a significant number of guests who would welcome Pirates replacement with a shorter, thrill-centered ride, but I doubt they would be a majority.
Put it this way - a lot of lifelong Disney fans (myself included), folks who visit too often and buy too much merchandise, were forged in the fires of classic EPCOT - much more, even, then MK. How many lifelong fans is modern EPCOT forging? Put another way, folks are (foolishly) queuing for seven hours to buy a plastic bucket that looks like a character from a ride that was destroyed over two decades ago. How long would the line be for a Mission: Space bucket?
Classic EPCOT died for a lot of reasons unrelated to its popularity. The sponsorship issue has already been pointed out. Another factor was Universal’s opening causing a panicked and misguided Eisner to feel EPCOT needed to be more “90s” - more hip, thrilling, xtreme, teen-oriented. It was stupid, but a shocking number of changes in the parks - Pandora, Superstar Limo, the entirety of MGM, SWL, the defunct festival center - can be traced to the CEO’s ego, and this was one.