ORLANDO, Fla. — Forget the long lines for the rides at Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter here. Nearly four years after opening, the attraction is still so popular that visitors routinely wait more than an hour just to get into a shop that sells wands.

Your guide to the rides, attractions, shows, and experiences in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter - Diagon Alley at Universal Studios Florida.

Moving to ease the gridlock — and shower its corporate parent, NBCUniversal, with more profits — Universal Orlando Resort on Thursday unveiled details for a huge Harry Potter expansion. There will be two major new rides, eight new stores (expect a second Ollivanders wand shop) and a sprawling Leaky Cauldron restaurant, all part of a new section called Diagon Alley, one of the marquee spots in J. Rowling’s fiction. A June opening is planned. Analysts estimate the cost to be $400 million. But a question hangs over Hogwarts: With no new Harry Potter books from Ms.

Rowling and three years having elapsed since the last blockbuster film, can the boy wizard really power this much added theme park capacity? Rivals like Disney and SeaWorld privately predict that the big pop Universal got from adding Harry Potter in 2010 — a 30 percent year-on-year rise in attendance — will be followed by a much smaller bump this time. Theme park experts say Universal also faces the challenge of higher expectations among consumers. The first Harry Potter world was so compelling that it will be difficult to wow visitors a second time. The new area is “a maze crisscrossing itself,” Mr.

Gilmore said as he led reporters on a tour of the Diagon Alley construction site, with narrow, winding streets lined by five-story buildings and a train trestle running overhead. There is also Gringotts Wizarding Bank, replete with goblins at work, a ride plunging through its dark vaults and a fire-breathing dragon on the roof. “We say that about the dragon, and people think we’re goofing around,” Mr.

Woodbury said. Mario Online here. This one blows a giant ball of fire.” Ms. Rowling collaborated with Universal to add new elements to Diagon Alley, including a large souvenir-selling space called Carkitt Market.

As a sign of increased pressure to produce something dazzling, Universal employed 60 designers on the sequel, compared with 18 on the original. Buku Biologi Kelas Xi Erlangga Pdf Reader more. The goal is not only to please Harry Potter fans but to make cash registers ring. Aside from the mountain of added merchandise the resort hopes to sell, Universal Orlando — made up of two theme parks — has carefully designed the expansion to increase the sale of more expensive multipark and multiday tickets. Wizarding World opened in 2010 at Islands of Adventure, the newer of Universal’s two parks.

Diagon Alley is in the abutting Universal Studios. To ride the Hogwarts Express connecting the two properties, visitors must buy multipark tickets. NBCUniversal has added attractions to its older Studios park over the last couple of years, including a “Despicable Me” simulator that turns riders into Minions. But the Universal Studios property is climbing out of a deep hole created by years of underinvestment by the resort’s previous owners, the Blackstone Group and General Electric.

There are still attractions themed around fading movies like “Twister” and characters like Betty Boop. Comcast’s NBCUniversal paid $1 billion in 2011 for full control of the resort. Islands of Adventure has annual attendance of about eight million; Universal Studios has a bit more than six million.

(To compare, the Magic Kingdom at Disney World annually attracts 17.5 million guests, according to the Themed Entertainment Association.) Theme parks, while vulnerable to the economy and requiring expensive and continuous upkeep, represent one of the few areas of growth outside of cable TV for entertainment companies. For the first nine months of last year, NBCUniversal recorded $747 million in operating cash flow, a 5.6 percent increase. In comparison, the company’s broadcast television business had operating cash flow of $205 million, a 23.4 percent decline, according to financial filings.