Photographs by Sinna NasseriOn a recent Friday morning, I found myself in a sea of bodies waiting to be admitted to Universal’s new $7 billion Orlando theme park, Epic Universe. Speakers hidden in the foliage blared a soaring melody suggestive of a heroic quest involving swords. The adults in the crowd, most of whom were unaccompanied by minors, wore performance athletic-gear. We filed through a metal detector and presented our tickets. Then all around me, people began to run. In recent years, Americans have drifted away from many of their once-beloved sources of pleasure: drinking, throwing parties, having sex, making friends. Yet they keep coming back to theme parks. In 2023, according to a report from the Themed Entertainment Association, 17.7 million people—more than the entire population of Sweden—visited the Magic Kingdom, one of the six parks that make up Walt Disney World, in Florida. And this is despite years of price hikes: At $199 on the busiest days, one ticket to the Magic Kingdom can cost more than a week’s worth of groceries. Disney’s “Experiences” division is more profitable than its TV and movie business, bringing in billions of dollars annually. Even so, park operators have had to work hard to engineer fun at a time when people have become more fickle about what qualifies. “When Disneyland opened, it was the most exciting technological thing you could see,” Phil Hettema, who spent more than a decade working on Universal’s parks, told me. “Now there’s nothing I can see anywhere in the world that I can’t see on my iPhone.”[From the February 2025 issue: Derek Thompson on the anti-social century]To meet this challenge, rides are bumping against the limits of physics and the human body to deliver experiences that are more death-defying than ever before. There are hyper-coasters (more than 200 feet tall), giga-coasters (more than 300 feet tall), and strata-coasters (even taller) capable of hurtling people at 120 miles an hour. A 640-foot-tall “exa-coaster” more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty will open soon in Saudi Arabia, and will reach speeds of 155 miles an hour.The goal is not just to delight but to overwhelm. In May, Epic Universe became the first major Florida theme park to open in more than 25 years. A complex of five themed “worlds,” it includes interactive robot dragons, a flame-throwing windmill, and a Harry Potter–inspired re-creation of 1920s Paris complete with true-to-scale Haussmann buildings overlooking imitation-cobblestone streets. I’d heard of visitors stepping inside and bursting into tears. Sinna Nasseri for The AtlanticA crowd enters Universal Epic Universe’s Super Nintendo World, one of five themed “worlds” at the complex.Walt Disney pioneered the art of micromanaging visitors’ experiences when, 70 years ago, he opened his first park, Disneyland, in California. To prevent life’s unpleasantness from impinging on his utopia, he did not allow the sale of newspapers and borrowed filmmaking techniques to place attractions within meticulously composed landscapes—a lush jungle, the Old West. In so doing, he helped invent what would come to be known as the theme park. “A theme park without rides is still a theme park,” wrote the researchers Margaret King and J. G. O’Boyle in an essay on the history of theme parks. “An amusement park without rides is a parking lot with popcorn.”At the Magic Kingdom—the successor to Disneyland that opened in 1971—the themes of various parts of the park are lax by current standards: You can, for example, find Aladdin’s carpets and a tiki room side by side under the broad heading of “Adventureland.” The latest thinking among park operators is that impressing visitors requires re-creating, to an unprecedented scale, complete worlds they know from movies and video games. Epic Universe is home to a wood-hewn, Viking-style land based on the How to Train Your Dragon franchise; a Super Nintendo World with perfectly spinning gold coins; and a horror-themed village inhabited by Dracula, Wolf Man, and other monsters from classic films, where the mist floating over gravestones feels eerie even under the Florida sun. The landscape at Epic Universe is so detailed that some visitors hire tour guides—which begin at $460 per person—to highlight minutiae they might miss and to share the history, both real and fictional, of their surroundings. As I speed-walked to the Harry Potter world (which is based on a prequel to the main Harry Potter series that is set in Paris in 1927), I passed green benches manufactured by the same company that made the originals in Paris in the 1920s and, with my back to an imitation Sacré-Coeur, watched a stick bug–like animatronic creature futzing with a lock in the window of an artfully aged yellow storefront. Sinna Nasseri for The AtlanticA rainstorm at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Disney parks are designed to produce a sense of “heightened reality.”I lined up for the Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry ride accompanied by Kevin Blakeney, a landscape architect who had worked on the park and who told me that the waiting area was designed to hold eight hours’ worth of people (hence the running: When the park opens, people race to get in line for the most popular rides). Blakeney, who left Universal last spring, specializes in equipping theme parks with all of the unsexy infrastructure required to function—toilets, cellphone towers—as well as ensuring that none of it impinges on the illusion. According to King and O’Boyle, visitors average eight hours in a theme park but only 10 to 15 minutes on rides.As we stood inside a white-tiled tunnel made to look like the Paris Métro, Blakeney directed my attention to the bathroom in the line, which parks have had to install to address the growing issue of visitors relieving themselves in interminable queues. In 2019, the Orlando Sentinel reported on a 22-year-old woman who, while waiting to board an Avatar-themed ride at Disney World, “felt something wet on the back of her leg” and discovered that the man next to her was peeing. Rather than sacrifice her own place in line, she waited another 20 minutes, then alerted an employee. To manage the thousands of people who descend daily, operators have studied visitors’ behavior and engineered their parks to move people around without anyone realizing they’re being nudged. One of Disney’s early innovations was to lure visitors through its parks with enormous structures, such as castles, that Walt Disney referred to as “wienies,” supposedly because of the gravitational pull he observed hot dogs having on his toy poodle. These days, Disney and Universal have teams of employees who sit in front of computers and security-camera feeds in offices inside the parks, keeping an eye on wait times and gridlock. If one part of a park is too empty, employees could send out a parade to draw people from a more crowded spot. If a queue is backing up, they could deploy a character to buoy spirits or, for something like a carousel, shorten the ride from five minutes to four. Background music might have a faster, more driving rhythm in areas where operators want to keep visitors moving, and elsewhere, have an end credits–type tempo to signal that it’s time to clear out. In a sense, you are on a ride from the moment you step foot in the park.Sinna Nasseri for The AtlanticA replica of Hogwarts Castle at Universal Islands of Adventure parkSinna Nasseri for The AtlanticThe waiting area for Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry at Epic Universe is designed to hold eight hours’ worth of people.I’d watched videos of the Harry Potter ride online, and I was looking forward to flying through the air alongside dueling witches and wizards who, while firing colorful clouds of spells at one another, trash the Ministry of Magic’s wood-paneled offices with help from stampeding beasts, then destroy a time-travel chamber, only to get sucked into the swirling black void of space. The difficulty of pulling off this illusion is hard to overstate. New rides like this one can cost $100 million, if not more, to create; incorporate LiDAR laser systems of the kind used on self-driving cars; and rely on robotic figures with thousands of moving parts. Designers do test runs, making minute adjustments to bring the elaborate machinery—lights, video projections, animatronics—into perfect sync. If any part of the ride becomes even a centimeter out of whack, it shuts down. But even as rides have become more complex, the storylines behind them have gotten quicker and simpler to accommodate shrinking attention spans. “You have to create these moments where they are impactful, but they’re not long enough to bore you. It’s like, ‘Wow, this is great.’ BOOM—and then you’re just jumping on to the next one,” Thierry Coup, a former Universal executive who oversaw the creative development of Epic Universe, told me. “It’s more like the TikTok philosophy.”Lines have not gotten any shorter, though. Disney and Universal offer the option to pay extra to cut certain queues; the day I visited Epic Universe, these passes cost $300 a person, on top of the $190 entry ticket—and they were sold out. Since Disney first started experimenting with a tiered entry system in 1999, theme parks have discovered that they need to build physical barriers separating the regular and express lines. “That’s a real point of frustration: to see the express moving so quickly when the standby is not,” Blakeney said. “That’s when fights break out among guests.”Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry sounded amazing, but I was anxious to see the rest of the park, and after eyeing the seemingly endless queue ahead of me and discovering that the ride was an hour from even opening, I wimped out of the line. I consoled myself with the thought that, according to some riders, I’d already experienced the best part: a cavernous, green-tiled room of airplane-hangar proportions that housed towering Ministry of Magic offices. I’d seen scattered grumbling online about the ride’s overreliance on screens, and The New York Times’ verdict was that “the queue is better than the ride.” I learned later that, on a day when the Battle at the Ministry ride went down because of technical issues, visitors had still ventured into the line just to see the waiting area.Sinna Nasseri for The AtlanticStardust Racers at Universal Epic UniverseSinna Nasseri for The AtlanticThe Jurassic Park River Adventure ride at Universal Islands of AdventureSinna Nasseri for The AtlanticPeople on Stardust Racers experience more than 4 g’s of force, a level at which the human heart struggles to pump blood.Walking around Epic Universe, I found myself hunting for spots where reality had intruded on the fantasy. But where? In the planters lining the outdoor cafés in Harry Potter’s Paris, every flower was perfectly in bloom. The only scuffing—on shop doors, on the walls of the Métro—had been artfully painted on to make the scenery look appropriately aged. Every night, Blakeney told me, an army of employees filed into Epic Universe to power wash sidewalks, deadhead the plants, repaint dirty walls, and replace lightbulbs. They’d work until dawn creating the illusion of effortless beauty. The unnatural perfection struck me as slightly offputting, but some people find that it can be hard to give up once they get used to it. Not long before my trip, Jill and Kevin Levett, a married couple in their 60s who live north of London, had flown to Orlando for the grand opening of Epic Universe. They were preparing to return a week later.The Levetts, semi-retired bus drivers, first visited Orlando’s theme parks together in 2012. Since then, they’ve basically quit vacationing anywhere except Universal’s four Florida parks. They travel to Orlando four or five times a year, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, and will go to the parks in costume. Kevin often dresses as a Hogwarts Express conductor from the Harry Potter series (red vest, customized pocket watch, suit dyed the perfect shade of brown); Jill frequently goes as the imperious witch Dolores Umbridge, shouting commands in a wig, a custom-made dress, and pale-pink ballet flats. “I stay in character all day,” Jill told me. “I’ve scared a lot of people.”While they’re in the parks, the Levetts post updates and photos to a 184,000-person Facebook group of Universal devotees, run by a company that helps plan vacations to Orlando theme parks. Through it, the Levetts have become so recognizable that fellow Universal fans will stop them in the parks to ask for selfies. Between flights, hotels, and their annual park passes, the couple estimates they spend $20,000 a year on their Orlando trips, though this seemed conservative given that they were preparing to pay $2,600 for a private VIP tour of Epic Universe with friends from their Facebook group.Last summer, after years of hip problems and some difficult surgeries to address them, Jill had an operation that went poorly. “When we came out of hospital, Jill was so down, so depressed, I turned around to her and said, ‘We’re going to Universal,’” Kevin recalled. A few weeks later, they were on a plane to Orlando. “You can’t forget everything that’s going on; you can’t forget the pain and things that you’re going through. But it helps you escape from some of that,” he said. “It was a place we knew that we could go—”“And we would be safe there,” Jill finished. At Universal’s parks, Kevin explained, “everything is as it should be in a perfect world.” Harry Potter’s Paris at Epic Universe, for example, has magical creatures and no cigarette butts. “Obviously, if you go to Paris, you’re going to see Paris as it really is,” he said. His frown made clear that “Paris as it really is” was indisputably a bad thing. [Read: I went to Disney World as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged Florida]Sinna Nasseri for The AtlanticDisney’s parks division is more profitable than its TV and movie business.For all the warm and fuzzy feelings they engender, theme parks spend an astronomical amount of effort and money to simulate the feeling that they are trying to kill us. Stardust Racers, the sinewy roller coaster that towers over Epic Universe, shoots bodies through the sky at more than 60 miles an hour and plunges them toward the surface of the Earth from the height of a 10-story building. On a roller coaster, the theme park commands your full and undivided attention. Roller-coaster aficionados have their own extensive vocabulary to catalog all of the techniques that rides use to give you the impression you’re going to die. Stardust Racers, which a roller-coaster critic called “one of the greatest on the planet,” has “top hats” (abrupt rises and falls mimicking the shape of Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat); “airtime hills” (which make you feel like you’re floating); “ejector airtime” (which tosses your body into the ride’s restraints); a “zero-g roll” (a 360-degree twist that spins you upside down and makes you feel weightless); “crossovers” (where the track loops back on itself); and several “head-choppers” (moments where the coaster seems like it’ll rip your skull off). One of the challenges of building coasters is that each one is, essentially, a prototype—Stardust Racers is the only ride in the world that weaves two groups of people around each other and upside down, mid-air—and these prototypes must work safely and reliably from opening day, 14 hours a day, hundreds of days a year, for 30 years (the estimated lifespan of a coaster). A roller coaster’s first riders are usually about 170 pounds with a head, torso, legs, and no arms. These dummies—human-shaped plastic bags filled with water to mimic the weight of real riders—can be outfitted with sensors, then loaded on a coaster to test whether speeds and g-forces conform to the computer’s predictions. Tweaks are rare, but sometimes necessary: a section of track might require reconstruction or brakes might need to be introduced to slow an unexpectedly speedy stretch. Disconcertingly, one can find videos online of dummies flying off rides during testing, though a 2005 survey of a decades’ worth of fatalities in the U.S. found that an average of four people die annually from coasters, fewer than the number killed by kitchen appliances. Roller coasters were once limited by technology, but now it’s our bodies that are holding them back. Coasters can subject riders to g-forces more powerful than those typically experienced by astronauts—people on Stardust Racers will experience more than 4 g’s of force, compared with the 3 g’s typical during a space-shuttle launch—though industry guidelines limit how long riders should be made to endure such strong accelerations. At upwards of 4 g’s, the human heart struggles to pump blood; you should experience this for no more than two seconds, per the standards for rides in the U.S. “The time is very important here because you don’t want people graying out or maybe even blacking out,” Daniel Schoppen, a roller-coaster designer with the firm Intamin, which has built attractions for Universal’s parks, told me. “This is not enjoyment. This is not fun.” Once a coaster has been deemed safe, its designers ride it over and over to further finesse the experience. To Schoppen, the best coaster is like a piece of music: “Every part has its own motif, has its own feeling,” he told me. Theme parks are trying to bring back visitors by building rides that change a little each time; on Stardust Racers, which has two trains of cars racing each other on separate tracks, if one train car falls behind, it gets an extra oomph of acceleration near the middle of the ride—an additional thrill that one critic called “boost mode.” The riders who stagger off of Stardust Racers have wide, shaky smiles. Braving a ride offers “a sense of assurance that you will survive no matter what is going on, what trials and tribulations you may be undergoing,” the Disney historian and former “Imagineer” Tom Morris told me. “It’s a way of proving that you can get through it.” When the world scares us, people turn to the controlled terror of theme parks.Sinna Nasseri for The AtlanticThe Celestial Park water fountains at Epic UniverseAfter the sun set, Epic Universe began to glow. I stood on the top floor of the Helios Grand Hotel, a $490-minimum-a-night Universal property where a concierge told me some guests had checked in just to stay in their room and gaze at the park all day, and watched the fountains below shoot flumes of water as the nightly light show began.From this angle, Super Nintendo World’s polka-dotted Piranha Plants bounced within view of an eight-lane highway, a reminder of how finite the fantasy really was. Theme parks are celebrated for providing an escape, but part of their appeal is that they are real brick-and-mortar spaces, painstakingly engineered for visitors’ pleasure. And for all their manicured artificiality, theme parks do not necessarily spoil us on reality. The playfulness they permit can follow us out. I was walking through the parking lot when, in between slow-moving wisps of clouds, I caught sight of a sliver of moon so horizontal, it made the night sky look crooked. How did they do that? I wondered, then immediately corrected myself: This is real. Later, I caught myself rewatching videos of Harry Potter and Battle at the Ministry, an endless stream of which is available online, captured by people holding up phones on the ride. I kept trying to re-create the experience I’d missed, and watched them until I’d mastered each beat: The animatronic Death Eater crouching on a bookshelf casts a spell, then Dolores Umbridge appears on a screen, then a rhinoceros-like Erumpent tries to gore the riders with its horn. I got to know the ride clinically, but I kept wondering about the physical thrill. It was both frustrating and satisfying to know people were still dreaming up experiences that demanded to be felt in person.