News Update - 2nd March 2017

It's time for another Theme Park Nut New Update.

Just the other week, while talking about Disney buying out Paris resort, we mentioned that Universal's owners Comcast had bought out a controlling 51% share of the Universal Studios Japan Resort. Well this week, Comcast bought out the remaining 49%! This can only be good news for USJ as the resort continues to thrive over the next few years leading up to the Tokyo Olympics.

At Disneyland Resort, we also saw this week the opening of the Red Rose Tavern, the temporary Beauty and the Beast overlay of Village Haus. From all reports, there were ridiculous queues and they did sell out of "The Grey Stuff" at least once. Interesting that the Grey Stuff in Disneyland is different to the Grey Stuff in WDW. Anyway, if you want a review of a number of the dishes (including the Grey Stuff) then check out Theme Park Insider.

Also at Disneyland this week, we've seen a change in policy over marking space before the daily parades. The new rule is, that you can't save space before the parade route is marked out, and that if you don't stay in your space, you lose it. This has a lot to do with the changes to the night time entertainment at the park, and it is probably just preventative before the situation got much worse.

I don't know if this is news or not, but some prominent French politicians went to Disneyland Paris to have pot shots at Donald Trump over his continued rubbishing of France. Fair enough too!

And because it's never to early to start thinking about Halloween, Universal Orlando announced the date for this years Halloween Horror Nights. The event will be on for 34 nights starting from September 15.


At home, Movie World have the released the first in their short series of videos on Safety and Maintenance. You can watch the video on YouTube and Facebook, and it's really good to see a bit of behind the scenes information. Interesting choice to have Green Lantern Coaster in the first video, given the incident that occurred on this ride 2 years ago.

All of this comes in response to last year's fatal incident at Dreamworld, which this week was reported to have cost the park $95.4 million dollars. In the half yearly results, the park reported that attendance is down 27 percent.


That's it for this week's News Update . For more Theme Park coverage, follow me on Twitter @themeparknut. Until next time, Cheers!