"Where has Ethan been?!?" I'm sure you're asking that. We're friends, you and I, and I was absent from Pop Heist for like TWO WEEKS!
Anyway, I'm sure you're concerned about me. But not to fear — I was out in California experiencing the inaugural Fan Fest Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood! I survived and lived to tell the tale to you!
We're friends, you and I.
This year saw the first attempt by Universal to cater exclusively to the Comic Con crowd by offering up exclusive after-hours experiences based not around a holiday, like Halloween Horror Nights, but around individual intellectual properties that people gravitate towards. Instead of Scare Zones, the haunted houses guests walk through to get spooked, the Fan Fest Nights activations were a mix of meet-and-greets, themed games, video shows, and large, multi-room guided immersive experiences.
Straight up, no lie: this is a great idea. And before you think I'm just going to slag it off with the long-winded expository snark I'm known for here at Pop Heist, I will come right out and say up front that this was a great idea that was very well-executed by the folks over at Universal, and I hope that it comes back bigger and better every year. Nowhere to go from here but up.
My spouse, Meghan, and I had the tickets in hand as soon as they went on sale, because one of the properties that was featured was Jujutsu Kaisen, an action anime that's built a rabid fanbase over here in the US. Universal Japan has had Jujutsu Kaisen in the park since 2022, with a 4D film experience and cafeteria-style restaurant, but this was the first time that American guests could see that film as it was meant to be viewed without traveling overseas. And as Meghan is a massive fan of Jujutsu Kaisen, we absolutely had to attend.
But here's the thing. Maybe it's our little secret, you and I. We chose to go on the last weekend that Fan Fest Nights was being held. It's only for a limited time, weekends in April and part of May, so opportunities to experience this event are few. And since Universal Studios Hollywood is primarily geared towards locals, the enormous crowds we had feared encountering had all attended in the weeks before. And I'll tell you, I've seen convenience stores more crowded than this theme park.
And that's awesome, especially as people who had never been to the California version of the Universal parks. All the rides and experiences of the park are still open after hours, minus the tram tour, so for the cost of a ticket, you get everything the park has to offer, PLUS the fan experiences, PLUS few-to-no lines, PLUS event-specific food, PLUS the regular food menus. We paid for the Express Pass that gets you to the front of the line and it didn't even matter. Everything in the park was a walk-on, including the brand new Mario Kart: Bowser's Challenge attraction that everyone's talking about. A 10-minute wait for something people normally wait hours for is a hoot.
Your mileage may vary on the activities that were available for the fans who came out. The biggest attraction was the Back to the Future interactive experience that was held on the Courthouse Square set in the studio's backlots. That film series is so tied into Universal that they've kept Courthouse Square as a set on their lot for decades, and it's a beloved part of the tram tour. And I'll admit … we skipped this one. It was a 45-minute-long interactive play, with actors in character recreating the big climax of the film. I heard good things about it, but it seemed like something that would be full of people so we avoided it. Unfortunately, the reviews of it were generally positive, so we missed out.
The Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons walkthrough experiences were the next best thing, with D&D taking the lead for us. The practical special effects were impressive and the enormous puppet-operated Beholder at the end was incredible. Worth the price of entry, for sure. We loved that instead of having the actors miked, the microphones were incorporated into the set, so someone was often talking into a tree or a staff.
Star Trek delivered a starship walkthrough during an emergency, so there was an air of controlled panic with a few effects like lights and smoke, plus actors in makeup. At the end you got to stand on the bridge of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek: Picard, which was something I can now say I did. Overall, it was a delightful way to spend a few minutes.
I'd say that the next tier down were the Yoshi egg hunt and the Jujutsu Kaisen 4D film. Collecting hidden eggs around Super Nintendo World garnered you a fun cardboard crown and a meet-and-greet with a blue Yoshi, who is apparently the J.D. Salinger of the Nintendo set and doesn't do appearances. The 4D JJK film was pretty kick-ass, taking over the theater that was normally showing the Kung-Fu Panda short, with gusts of wind, immersive animation, and rumbling seats. Honestly, for anime nerds like us, this was THE big event and it didn't disappoint.
The ONE PIECE meet-and-greets were joys of character interaction, with skilled performers taking on the roles of Luffy, Zoro, Nami, Usopp, and Sanji (who did have his trademark cigarette). There wasn't much for them to do, but their enthusiasm and chemistry with each other made them the real superstars of the night. The only lines in the entire park were for these photo ops, and everyone got their money's worth.
Besides that, there were some photos you could take with a Niffler from Harry Potter and the lead characters from Wicked, although they were staged far away from the rest of the park for some reason. No lines for either of them when we were there.
So that's what was there. But overall, was it something Universal should do again?
100%. There were a lot of lessons learned with this trial balloon of an event, lessons that could lead to optimization of the event down the road. Some of those lessons could be gleaned from what people were wearing, what fandoms they chose to represent. The older crowd? Back to the Future and Star Trek. I didn't see anyone under the age of late-30s wearing anything representing these franchises, but there were enough older people cosplaying as both to justify them returning next year. The college-aged kids were in Harry Potter robes and D&D costumes, really well-decked out ones too. Younger kids? Well, there were more ONE PIECE cosplayers than anyone else that I saw, and not just the main pirate crew either. Shout out to the kids who went deep with their character choices. Jujustu Kaisen had some cosplayers as well, which I was happy to see.
Nintendo and Wicked? Didn't see much from them, although there was a party of D&D adventurers with costumes themed to Super Mario characters that we adored.
The solution should be to do more with ONE PIECE than the character interactions. Maybe bring the water cannon show that Japan has going during the summers. The fans are thirsty for more ONE PIECE, what with it being a huge manga, anime, and now live-action show on Netflix that has a second season on the way.
Jujutsu Kaisen was kind of the odd man out, since the show is fairly popular here, but nowhere near as big as ONE PIECE or even hometown fave Back to the Future. However, it's something simple that Universal already had available that could be plugged into an existing space without much difficulty. As much as we'd love to see it come back, without an existing knowledge of the show, it's a hard sell to tourists. It's tough to justify a show with subtitles at an American theme park, for a property that's grown mostly by word of mouth rather than concentrated marketing blitzes in the US. Still … if it wasn't for JJK, we wouldn't have made the trip from New York to California.
The catch to this all is that the crowd for this event is mostly going to be California locals, not chumps like us who'll make the trip out to a park you really can do in a day if you have Express Pass. Already, after a few weekends of Fan Fest Nights, local attention had dropped off so significantly that no ride, show, or attraction in the entire park had a line longer than 15 minutes, and that includes the ONE PIECE photos. To get people coming out to Fan Fest Nights 2: Electric Boogaloo, they're going to need to give the townies something new to see and do. They can't just repeat 2025 because that evidently wasn't bringing people back. It remains to be seen if they'll rise to that challenge.
Finally, I'm going to give a round of applause to everyone across the world who has made role-playing games mainstream. We're about 40 years away from when "concerned" parent groups would make videos warning about the dangers of D&D. Now? The D&D walkthrough was a definite highlight of our night. Costumes, effects, crowd interaction, a fucking Beholder that was larger than me, a themed cafe … and the people loved it. The outfits people were wearing out in the park were even better than the costumes the Universal actors had. I felt God in this Chili's tonight.
Could it have been better? Eh, probably. There's always stuff that could be improved on once you've had a few weeks of testing with real crowds. And I do hope that Universal goes ahead with plans for another one next year, with updates to their offerings the same way that Halloween Horror Nights updates itself every year. Universal threw a bone to the different niche fandoms in this world and I think they did an admirable job.
Here's my pitch: next year, an interactive Garfield experience…
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