Universal Epic Universe is Here — So How are Walt Disney World Wait Times?

Today, at long last, Universal Epic Universe is celebrating its grand opening. In the years, months, and days leading up to this occasion, the big talk in the theme park community has been about what impact this expansion of the Universal Orlando Resort would have on Walt Disney World.

In fact, just a week or so ago, a friend was asking me if I thought that wait times at Walt Disney World would be impacted by the new park down the road. While I initially told them that it would be incredibly difficult to measure such a thing given the numerous factors that go into theme park attendance and wait statistics, I then started thinking of ways I could try to make it as “apples to apples" as possible. So here’s what I came up with.

First, there was timeframe to consider. Even as Walt Disney World attempts to spread out its demand across the calendar, attendance is still seasonal. For example, comparing Spring Break to the middle of January would make no sense. With that in mind, for step one, I looked at wait times from May 1st, 2025 through yesterday, May 21st, 2025. Furthermore, I limited the results to only weekdays (Monday through Friday).

Next, rather than look at wait times from all of the resort’s numerous attractions, I decided to choose five popular attractions from each park. This list included:

Finally, I wanted to focus on the busiest hours for each park. Thus, I decided to limit the average wait times to the operating hours from open to 4 p.m. ET.

With that out of the way, let’s look at the results (based on the explained parameters above):

Looking specifically at Thursdays this month (since today is Thursday), the averages were slightly higher overall, including 52.2 minutes for Magic Kingdom, 44.8 for EPCOT, 49.7 minutes for Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and 42.7 for Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

Now let’s look at data from today, May 22nd, 2025 — AKA: Epic Universe’s grand opening. Once again looking at popular attraction data from each park’s opening through 4 p.m., here were the single-day averages:

As you can see… not a big change. The most significant difference is actually an increase of 7.2 minutes at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, while EPCOT’s average also rose by 4.6 minutes. Magic Kingdom and Disney’s Animal Kingdom were off slightly, down 4.6 and .2 minutes respectively from the monthly weekday averages so far.

I was also curious about how recent wait times compared to last year at Walt Disney World. So, I pulled the same data for the week of running from May 20th, 2024 to May 24th, 2024 (which, like this year, falls just before Memorial Day weekend). However, since Tiana’s Bayou Adventure had yet to open at this time and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad wasn’t undergoing refurbishment as it is now, I swapped these two attractions in the dataset. As you’d expect, this led to lower average wait time at Magic Kingdom as Tiana’s current average wait on Thursdays is 50 minutes compared to 25.6 for Big Thunder.

Nevertheless, the results showed an average of:

To recap, with the exception of Magic Kingdom, these wait times from last year are higher than we’ve seen so far this month on average — including today. In particular, Hollywood Studios' average was significantly higher this time last year compared to this month and day. Still, it’s hard to suggest that this discrepancy is due to the opening (or impending opening) of Epic Universe.

Of course, it should also be noted that, not only is this the first day Universal Epic Universe has officially been open but it's also been less busy than some anticipated (you can check out wait times for yourself). This could be the result of Universal limiting ticket sales until operational kinks can be fully worked out or may reflect hesitation on the part of some consumers to visit a park they assumed would be jam packed. Either way, it will be some time before we have more insight on the average waits at the new park.

In turn, while these data points may be intriguing, there are still too many variables at play to determine if Universal Epic Universe and the expansion of the Universal Orlando Resort are actually impacting Walt Disney World attendance and wait time figures. If Disney execs are to be believed, they anticipate that the area will see a lift overall rather than Universal’s success coming at Disney’s expense. Which theory will bear out? We’ll have to wait and see — so I’ll keep an eye on this data and report back periodically.