Given the run of an entire theme park on a 93-degree Texas morning, a four-year-old at Universal Kids Resort in Frisco skipped the roller coasters, the water rides and the Minions. He headed straight for a small wooden caterpillar playground built in the style of the “Trolls” films. It was the sort of thing he could find at home, and it says a lot about the park.
Universal Kids Resort opens July 1 and is unlike anything else the company runs. It is aimed at children between three and eight. There are no walk-inside worlds from “E.T.,” “Jurassic World” or Harry Potter, no “Fast and the Furious”-style coasters, no 3D motion simulators. Instead of Hollywood or Orlando, the park sits in a mid-sized city about 30 miles north of Dallas.
A feeder for the big parks
Executives told TheWrap the park is smaller in both scale and budget than the coastal resorts, and that it is meant to steer families toward them later. Market research pointed to North Texas, where a growing population and economy could support a park that turns a profit on regional visitors alone. The same families get hooked on characters that feed the wider Comcast business.
“This is where young kids will go on their first roller coaster, where they’ll meet the characters for the first time, and hopefully they form a love of those characters and those stories and they want to see the movies, they want to watch the TV shows, and then when they get older, they come to the big park. It’s sort of a rite of passage,” said Page Thompson, president of UDX New Ventures, who oversees development of new resorts and parks. “I think that the success of this park will open up a lot of opportunities for us.”
The approach resembles Disney’s long-running habit of recruiting fans young. Universal’s parks division brought in nearly $10 billion in 2025, a steady counterweight to its more volatile film and TV businesses, and the company has been pushing hard against Disney for theme park business.
Lands cover Minions, Trolls, Shrek, Jurassic World and SpongeBob SquarePants, which Universal licenses from Paramount. Rides are few. Two kid-sized roller coasters, one themed to “Trolls” and one to “Jurassic World,” share space with a “Minions” water ride, and splash pads and playgrounds fill much of the rest. There are no height restrictions of the kind that keep younger children off rides at Universal’s larger parks, so at the mid-June media preview the four-year-old rode almost everything. The playgrounds and splash areas were just as popular as the coasters.
Why Frisco
Thompson laid out three ways Universal wants to grow: expand its existing parks, as with Epic Universe in Orlando and a “Fast and Furious” coaster on the way; build resorts abroad, including a London-area resort due in 2031; and develop new concepts for new audiences in new places. Frisco falls in the third group.
Dallas is one of the five largest U.S. markets and one of the fastest growing. Census data put the area’s population at more than 8.4 million, up 11% since 2020. Disney once eyed the Dallas area for an expansion of its own that was later scrapped.
“We picked Frisco because there are already millions of people coming to Frisco for the FC Dallas and the PGA and the Dallas Stars and all of the other things that they have here,” Thompson said. A neighboring highway makes the trip easy. Universal expects most guests from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana. Annual passes have already sold out, and the 300-room hotel connected to the park, which Universal owns and operates, is taking bookings for multi-day trips from Texas residents. “That’s exactly what we hoped would happen, so we’re very pleased to see that happening,” he said.
Foreign visitors are not filling the gap right now. Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said in April that international travel to U.S. parks remains below pre-COVID levels.
The middle of the country already has parks. Texas has two Six Flags locations, in San Antonio and Dallas, plus a small Peppa Pig park in Dallas. Silver Dollar City is in Branson, Missouri, Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and Cedar Point in Ohio. None carries Universal’s brand weight, and the Frisco park gets there before Disney does with a regional park from either of the two big names.
Former Disney Imagineer Jim Shull, who runs a theme park YouTube channel called Disney Journey, said “Universal was not wrong to try their hand at delivering a small regional theme park.” He counted 12 parks across the country on a similar footing. “The template is a strong one, and a proven one.”
Price and size
A day at Universal Kids Resort costs $69.99. Six Flags Over Texas charges $39 and the Peppa Pig park $24. Universal Studios Hollywood starts at $109, and a standard Epic Universe ticket is $140. The Frisco park covers 32 acres. Epic Universe has 135 and Islands of Adventure 125, while Universal Studios Hollywood has 415 and includes a working movie studio.
There are themed lands but no dark rides and none of the high-tech attractions found at the coastal parks. A slow-moving ride based on “The Secret Life of Pets,” which opened at Universal Studios Hollywood in 2021, would seem a natural fit and is absent. Splash pads come in handy given the lack of indoor attractions.
Brian Robinson, executive vice president and chief creative officer of Universal Creative Studio, said he began with a simple question as the father of nine-year-old twins. “The first thing I look for is where are they going to play, where are they going to just go and run?” He and Universal Creative President Molly Murphy led the design, and both said seeing the park through a child’s eyes was their guide.
Not everyone is sold. After the first images hit social media, skeptics asked where the lavish theming of the Orlando and Hollywood parks had gone. Shull was critical too: “It’s a good idea, poor execution. They need shade and they need three dark rides.” With the heat index at 103 during the preview, the missing shade and indoor rides were easy to feel. Parents used to the immersion of the bigger parks may find this one stripped down.
For three-to-eight-year-olds, though, it works as a playground with no boundaries, and it deepens their attachment to Universal characters. The opening comes the same week “Minions & Monsters” reaches theaters, nearly 15 years after “Despicable Me” started the franchise.
The wider push
Epic Universe, Universal’s fourth Orlando gate, opened in 2025 as the first major U.S. theme park in 25 years and helped lift parks revenue 14% last year. First-quarter parks revenue rose 24% from a year earlier to $2.4 billion. NBCUniversal announced a corporate split on Monday that will separate its parks, movie and TV side from the connectivity side.
Construction is under way on Universal’s first U.K. park, a $6.7 billion project on 540 acres outside London, rumored to include lands for James Bond and Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films. In Las Vegas, Universal Horror Unleashed, a year-round version of Halloween Horror Nights with rotating themes, operates inside AREA51, a shopping and attraction complex designed by Gensler that also houses Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart.
Frisco cost an estimated $550 million, a fraction of the more than $7 billion spent on Epic Universe. Asked where else Universal considered building, Thompson declined to say. “We might build there someday.”
