Universal Epic Universe, the brand new theme park at Universal Orlando Resort, opened a week ago! And we’re not there! I opted to sit this opening out, reasoning that I’d rather get on-the-ground experience a bit after the debut so that I can hopefully provide people some reports that look a little more like what they can expect from the rest of summer.
But while everyone else is in sunny Florida, there’s still one nice thing I can do from the comfort of my presently very rainy home—data analysis! So, here’s what the data from the first two days at Epic Universe looks like…
Last Update: Day 8, May 29, 2025 4PM
About This Post
While the park has been open a week, that’s not a huge amount of time. Most of the crowds are probably still “early adopter” types, with regular vacation crowds starting to trickle in and really taking hold later in June. Patterns are starting to develop, and it’s looking like it will indeed be a busy summer.
For this post, I’m relying on posted wait times, which are not always indicative of actual wait times. Beside the obvious (that posted wait times aren’t precision-calibrated and are indeed intentionally incorrect sometimes) a ride that opens with a 60-minute wait will still be a zero-minute wait for the first person in line. For the most part, all the data I’m using can be found on the excellent site Thrill-Data.
One Week In - Epic Universe Waits
The Epic Universe “soft launch”, where Universal apparently kept crowds deliberately low for the first few days, appears to be over. Here are the average waits from day 7, May 28:
Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry - 220 minutes
Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge - 114 minutes
Mine-Cart Madness - 77 minutes
Meet Toothless (greeting) - 69 minutes
Curse of the Werewolf - 60 minutes
Monsters Unchained - 57 minutes
Stardust Racers - 48 minutes
Hiccup’s Wing Gliders - 45 minutes
Yoshi’s Adventure - 41 minutes
Dragon Racer’s Rally - 40 minutes
Fyre Drill - 38 minutes
Constellation Carousel - 25 minutes
If you waited all those averages, you’d need 834 minutes (about 14 hours), and that’s not including time on the rides. The park is only open 12 hours, so you’re obligated to beat the averages if you want to get on all 11 rides and experience the Meet Toothless greeting.
If you have Early Admission, the go-to strategy seems to be to start with Mine-Cart Madness, as Battle at the Ministry does not usually operate during Early Admission and has some continuing reliability issues. That said, today (May 29), Mine-Cart Madness was delayed until closer to 10AM.
With Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge and Yoshi’s Adventure as backups nearby, starting with Mine-Cart Madness probably still makes the most sense.
Turning to the situation at Battle at the Ministry, that ride has performed better than many expected. In the first seven days the park was open, only three days saw serious delays (one of which was barely two hours). The ride did seemingly close early (around 7:30PM) on May 27—a bummer to the “save it for the end of the day” crowd.
As crowds have increased, waits at Battle are not dropping like they were early on, with 2 to 4 hours being the average the last three days. The plus side is you probably don’t have to overthink it—just find a 3-hour block in your day when you want to wait.
This will probably be the last update of this kind. I look forward to visiting Epic Universe soon enough and putting together my whole park strategy.
The Data from The Second Day of Epic Universe
Here’s a look at how day 2 went…
Early Admission Begins
Today was the first day of Early Admission for Universal resort guests, and it looks like five rides were available: Yoshi’s Adventure, Mine-Cart Madness, Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge, Hiccup Wing’s Gliders, and Constellation Carousel.
Of these, Mine-Cart Madness and Mario Kart were the two most popular during Early Admission, sporting waits of 35 and 55 minutes, respectively, when the park opened to other guests at 9AM. A route that started with Mine-Cart Madness and then proceeded to Mario Kart would have made good use of this time.
As I’m not on the ground, I can’t say what the physical situation around Battle at the Ministry looked like during this hour. The ride didn’t start operating until just after 9AM (regular park opening time), opening with a wait time of 300 minutes. It’s possible that guests who used all of their Early Admission time to wait outside the land or ride were able to get on quickly at that point, but I wouldn’t recommend that approach given how yesterday (discussed more below) went.
Regular Park Opening on Day 2
As noted above, Battle at the Ministry was not a part of Early Admission and opened just after 9AM with a 300-minute wait. That dropped to 180 minutes by 10AM.
As expected, we’re seeing crowds spread out a bit more on day 2 than day 1. Specifically, by 10AM waits were up to…
60 minutes at Stardust Racers
35 minutes at Mine-Cart Madness
75 Minutes at Mario Kart
Those waits essentially beat the peak waits from the day before. This serves as a reminder that the first day is unlike any other day, and it’s likely it’ll be a few weeks before we really get a sense of what crowds are doing in this park. That said, my “day 3” strategy with Early Admission would be Mine-Cart Madness, Mario Kart, and then Stardust Racers.
Also, notably, the Toothless greeting opened toward the tail end of Early Admission and worked its way up to a 60-minute wait, where it sits at 10AM. It peaks at 160 minutes on day 1 before settling down to under an hour for most of the day.
Afternoon and Evening
The big winner for day 2 was Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry, which remained operational without interruption for the full day, including spending most of the day with a wait of 60 minutes or less.
There’s no question that if the ride continues to operate like that, it will be worth waiting until later in the day to ride…but we just don’t 100% trust it at this point. Personally, I’d still be willing to hop in line with a 2-hour wait (the queue is notably quite good) once I’d gotten a few rides done.
What’s Next?
There really isn’t much else to say about day 2 waits. It was a perfect day to be in the park. With the caveat that we still have worries for Battle at the Ministry, our attention now turns to crowd levels going forward.
It’s been expected that crowd levels at Epic Universe will increase as summer goes on. Three factors are keeping the park less crowded:
Universal isn’t selling that many tickets
People are waiting for more ticket options
People are waiting out the hectic first few days
Universal controls those first two levers, so we’ll be interested to see how they’ve managed capacity going forward. Note that several days in the coming weeks are sold out of one-day tickets, so this is not just a low demand situation.
As crowds increase, park strategy will matter more. I suspect it’ll look mostly like what we’ve seen so far, with the main morning question being whether or not it makes sense to go to Battle at the Ministry. We’ll keep our eyes on this and have on-the-ground reporting from our own trip in not too long.
Battle at the Ministry Day 1 Notes
Note: This was written in the morning of day 2.
My original content from day 1 is kept below, but at this point on day 2 we’re already seeing significant changes. Since I covered the most critical issues above, I’m going to turn to the one remaining (and very big) piece of the puzzle—Battle at the Ministry. You can check out the day 1 wait time chart here, but I’m going to summarize it with commentary.
On day 1, Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry opened with a posted wait of 240 minutes at 8:30AM before jumping to 300 right around 8:45AM. The ride either operated for a very short time or not at all before being marked as “delayed” at 9:30AM. It remained closed until 3PM, when it reopened with a posted wait of 160 minutes.
It hovered in the 150-240 range until about 7:30PM, when it started dropping, falling to 90 minutes by 8PM.
This very limited data set—supplemented by the fact that we know unreliability is not a rarity with this attraction—pulls us in two directions.
On the one hand, it makes sense to do everything else in the park before settling in for a wait on Battle at the Ministry later in the day. The first few hours offer low to low-ish waits for everything else, while Battle at the Ministry might start at 300 minutes and end at under 90 minutes.
On the other hand, if a ride can be down for 6 hours to start the day, it can be down for 6 hours to end the day. If you get in line at 9AM and the ride breaks down, you can at least try later. If it breaks down later in the day and you haven’t ridden, you might just be out of luck.
There’s no right answer here. My day 3 approach would be to get to Battle at the Ministry quickly—yes, I’d be willing to get in a 4-hour line—but I’d try and do at least 3, if not more, rides before settling in.
Original Day 1 Content Starts Here
It’s just before 2PM now and there’s not much to update, so I’m just going to do this quick update here before continuing with the post as written at 10AM. So, as of (just before) 2PM…
The wait for the Toothless greeting is down to 55 minutes. It peaked at 160 minutes around 8:30AM but dropped to 45 minutes by 10:40AM. As of this update, it’s the only operating “attraction” with a wait over 30 minutes.
Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge is down to 25 minutes. It’s ranged from 15 to 45 minutes throughout the morning.
Everything else is under 20 minutes, except…Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry still has not reopened. The ride has been down for over 4 hours now. This is certainly not the debut that Universal wanted, though no one can quite say it was unexpected at this point. (Update to the update: Battle at the Ministry reopened just after 3PM.)
People who arrived at the park and went anywhere other than Battle at the Ministry could maybe have done all the other attractions by now and are just left to wait to see if that one manages to reopen.
I’ll check back in this evening…
(Original Post Continues Here)
After an opening ceremony, guests started accessing lands and rides around 8:15AM, with most rides operating by 8:30AM. There was a trend of wait times being overstated right at 8:30AM, so I think the 8:45AM posted waits better reflect the status of the park at the beginning of the day.
The “First” Batch of Epic Wait Times
At 8:45AM, the posted wait times for the 11 rides and one uber-popular character greeting were:
Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry - 300 minutes
Meet Toothless and Friends - 100 minutes
Mine-Cart Madness - 35 minutes
Monsters Unchained - 20 minutes
Curse of the Werewolf - 20 minutes
Stardust Racers - 15 minutes
Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge - 15 minutes
Hiccup's Wing Gliders - 10 minutes
Fyre Drill - 10 minutes
Dragon Racer's Rally - 10 minutes
Constellation Carousel - 5 minutes
Yoshi’s Adventure - 5 minutes
For the most part (continue reading), this is a pretty tame, manageable debut for a theme park. My instant reaction is fear that I wasted a bunch of money on my Express Pass purchase for our visit next month.
Universal’s Express Pass for Epic Universe excludes three rides: Dragon Racer’s Rally, Mine-Cart Madness, and Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry. Not coincidentally, two of these are the only rides posting waits over 20 minutes as of the park’s debut.
We’ll have to see how the afternoon shakes up. Those Battle at the Ministry crowds will probably go somewhere else as the day goes on. So, shifting gears to that ride…
How Has Battle at the Ministry Done?
The headline here is obviously that Battle at the Ministry quickly jumped to 300 minutes. It actually opened at 240 minutes at 8:30AM before jumping to 300 right around 8:45AM. Combined with the downtick we saw in posted waits at the other rides, it looks like Universal’s crowd predictions were slightly off, with even more people favoring Battle at the Ministry than they expected.
Unfortunately, Battle at the Ministry temporarily closed at around 9:25AM, having not reopened as of publication just after 10AM.
This is in keeping with the ride’s questionable reliability heading into this week. The big question going forward is sort of “when will guests get the hint?”
If I were heading to Epic tomorrow, would I start at Battle at the Ministry? No way! I wouldn’t blame those who do, but I’d be starting at Mine Cart Madness (the Meet Toothless greeting doesn’t factor into my analysis, though).
But this isn’t going to be indicative of most guests. Many people want to get on Battle at the Ministry more than all other rides in the park combined. And not everyone wakes up thinking “oh fun, I get to look at Epic Universe data today!” So, we’ll see in the coming days and weeks how much guests start to shift away from starting at Battle at the Ministry, where they go, and how probable increased park capacity impacts this. (And what will Early Admission look like?)