The 21 best new themed attractions coming in 2024

The highly anticipated new Fantasy Springs land will open at Tokyo DisneySea on 6 June and feature four amazing new dark rides along with the new Fantasy Springs Hotel which will have an exclusive entrance right into the new land.

The new rides included will include Anna and Elsa’s Frozen Journey (a boat ride), Fairy Tinker Bell’s Busy Buggies (dark ride), Peter Pan’s Never Land Adventure (a unique dark ride creation) and Rapunzel’s Lantern Festival (another boat ride). At this point Tokyo Disney is keeping all its secrets very close to the vest as it puts the finishing touches on this epic new land of fantasy.

The former Spookslot haunt attraction experience will be replaced by an all-new concept ride experience called Danse Macabre.

This will feature the world premier of Intamin’s new Dynamic Motion Stage ride concept, featuring an 18-meter wide turntable with six smaller turntables on top. Each of these is able to hold 18 guests, for a total of 108 riders per cycle who will ride, tilt, fall and spin around the supernatural world of Danse Macabre.

Disney’s infamous Splash Mountain attraction that closed last year will reopen this summer as Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, featuring an extensive thematic makeover to bring the world from Disney’s The Princess and The Frog animated film to life.

Look for the Disneyland version in California to also open in late 2024 as long as their schedule remains on track.

The new Donkey Kong Country expansion to the park’s Super Nintendo World may go down as one of the most hotly anticipated theme park sequel projects of all time. Even though Super Nintendo World opened back in 2021, the land has remained the most popular attraction space in the entire park.

With Super Nintendo World often requiring reservations and a little bit of luck just to enter even today, the addition of a Donkey Kong-themed expansion will help provide some much-needed relief and extra capacity to the area.

The highlight of the land will be the premier of Universal’s “Boom Coaster” concept, which will hide the true roller coaster tracks from view, allowing the riders only a view of a set of faux mine cart-themed tracks. The fake tracks will give the illusion that things are in a state of utter disrepair, with twisted and bent rails to be found, along with some complete gaps in the track itself that the mine karts will have to “jump” over.

(NOTE: American audiences will be treated to an all-new Super Nintendo World that will open with the Donkey Kong land as part of the Universal Epic Universe theme park opening in 2025.)

The park’s original Fire in the Hole dark ride/coaster experience was retired at the end of 2023 and will be replaced by an all-new, cutting-edge, dark coaster creation that will thrill future park guests for generations.

The storyline will be an expanded offering from the original creation, with a new family-friendly roller coaster system installed by Rocky Mountain Construction, complete with a new on-board audio system. The new Fire in the Hole will pass through 14 iconic show scenes and like the original, it will feature a total of three drops, including the popular splash-down finale.

Originally proposed for the 2023 season, Europa-Park will finish building its new Croatia-themed land this season, complete with its most advanced roller coaster concept to date, the Voltron Nevera.

The unique roller coaster was designed to offer an amazing 1,600 riders per hour capacity through a layout that will feature 1,385 meters of track, a 105º looping launch as the first of four total launch moments, a turn-table and seven inversions before all is said and done.

If that wasn’t enough, Europa-Park is looking to repair the fire damage caused last year with the creation of a new Austria-themed area that will repair the Tiroler Wildwasserbahn log flume and offer a fully rebuilt Alpen Coaster Enzian attraction that will travel through a newly themed Austrian landscape.

The first Intamin “Hot Racer” single-rail coaster in Europe will open this year, taking visitors on a wild ride through the ruins of an ancient civilization.

The coaster will stand just 18 meters tall, 600 meters long, and hit a top speed of 67 km/h as it passes through two different launch tracks, and flips riders through three inversions and over 13 different air-time moments.

Expected by the end of 2024, Dreamworld will open the gates to an entirely new land called Rivertown. Several nearby existing rides will be rethemed and renamed to fit into the new land which will be anchored by a new themed Vekoma roller coaster named Jungle Rush.

The trains will be themed like an off-road jeep, with a layout featuring 12 airtime moments, the world’s first “inclined turntable”. The layout will run through an extensively themed jungle ruins set and is also rumored to feature a switchback style layout able to offer “multiple different cycle paths”.

Image courtesy of Pico Play

From the dark ride experts at Sally Dark Rides, with input from Alterface, comes the world’s first interactive SpongeBob-themed dark ride. The new $6 million interactive experience will feature Mr. Krabs inviting guests to try out a series of wacky carnival games. Meanwhile, the evil Plankton is still trying to steal the secret formula to the Krabby Patty recipe.

The new dark ride is said to feature five-passenger vehicles, vibrant sets, special effects, animatronics and ‘vivid integrated projections.”

In addition to rethemeing the former “Limit” inverted roller coaster (Vekoma) as Toxic Garden, Heide Park will open an all-new dark ride experience called Dämonen Gruft / Demon’s Tomb.

 

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This ties into a story about how ancient catacombs hidden beneath the theme park were discovered during some excavation work, which led to the creation of a unique tour of the catacombs. Strangely some guests on these tours began to vanish without a trace, and whispers that the Demon’s Tomb may be some kind of terrible trap is on the rise.

Alterface also worked on this interactive ride.

Legoland is performing a remodel of pre-historic proportions this year as two original park attractions have been closed to create the new Dino Valley land. The former Fairy Tale Brook water ride will become the Explorer River Quest and the former Safari Trek jeep ride will become the Duplo Little Dino Trail.

The two new attractions are being combined with the existing Coastersaurus family coaster to create a large-scale new Lego Dinosaurs-themed environment.

While much of the talk lately has been about the huge list of new attractions and resort experiences being proposed for Saudi Arabia’s “Vision 2030” plan to reinvent itself, it appears that the nation’s first such attraction has just opened this past week in Riyadh’s Boulevard City.

Created in record time through a partnership between WWE and Thinkwell, the new “WWE Experience” attraction was created in response to the popularity of the WWE brand within the country. This was sparked by an initial multi-year deal with Saudi Arabia to host two large-scale Premium Live Events each year.

The new WWE Experience attraction is more than just a themed museum-style experience, but features many interactive exhibits that allow guests to experience what it is like to be a WWE Superstar. This includes a trip through The Undertaker’s Graveyard and the ability to create their own unique “entrance” and experience a walk down the ramp to the ring.

The popular Cadbury World attraction in Birmingham, England will replace its former “Cadabra” dark ride with an all-new dark ride experience called Cadbury Chocolate Quest. The former dark ride system has been scrapped and replaced with an entirely new ride system that will feature trackless vehicles, giving guests laser pointers in which to gather the necessary ingredients needed to create a Cadbury Dairy Milk bar.

As a bonus, the riders will get a Cadbury chocolate treat to enjoy for their efforts.

Alterface, a leader in interactive technology, has provided the interactive tech for the ride, while 1050 Studio, a specialist in creating media-based, immersive rides and attractions, worked on the media and ETF Ride Systems, a leading ride designer and manufacturer, provided the ride vehicles.

A first-of-its-kind family-launched coaster will open at SeaWorld from B&M. This will start the experience traveling through a themed indoor space that was formerly used for the park’s Antarctica dark ride. Just like the former dark ride, guests exiting the roller coaster experience will first travel through the park’s frigid penguin habitat.

Originally announced for 2022 before encountering delays, this will be an entirely new themed land for the theme park, full of several brightly themed attractions as well as two new family roller coasters: the Choco Chip Creek (Vekoma Mine Train) and Honey Harbour (Vekoma Family Coaster)

Another step forward in the micro-park trend, Merlin is following up its first Peppa Pig Theme Park that opened next to the Legoland Florida theme park with a completely stand-alone park experience for kids to enjoy in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

The park is expected to be mostly a copy of the experience created in Florida, including a copy of the Daddy Pig’s Roller Coaster ride.

After several years of construction, the long-awaited Mattel Adventure Park is set to open in 2024, opening the portal for guests to experience attractions set within the different themed worlds of the famous toy company’s creations.

This will include a visit to the Barbie Beach House (complete with a Flying Theater experience through Barbie’s world), a He-Man & Skeletor-themed Laser Tag experience, two different roller coasters themed to Hot Wheels, various rides themed to Thomas & Friends through the World of Sodor, and with other attractions themed to Mattel games like Uno, Rock em / Sock em Robots and the Kerplunk Drop Tower.

Set to open in July, France’s famous Futuroscope turned its eye for creating amazing new visual worlds to the task of creating an indoor waterpark experience like no other.

Visitors to the waterpark will find themselves surrounded by unique sights and sounds through the use of aquatic projections and digital projection mapping as they move around the themed spaces.

Get your walking shoes on as Warner Bros. MovieWorld will be opening an entirely new land themed to the world of The Wizard of Oz.

In addition to themed environments, the land will feature two distinctly different roller coaster experiences, an inverted coaster called Flight of the Wicked Witch and a pair of racing/dueling shuttle coasters called the Kansas Twister.

The details of this new indoor attraction are still mostly unknown, but it seems to promise a simulated adventurous railway ride that goes on a “world tour”, including traveling through the hot desert and down to the ocean depths.

I’ve also heard hints that the experience may somehow utilize some kind of new AI technology along the way.

Going out on a limb here, I’m going to list the unknown new attraction under construction at Gardaland. Previous statements from the park indicated that a themed attraction inspired by the legends of the Native Americans would be opening in 2024. Hints were dropped that it could be tied to various rituals performed by the Native Americans.

While the exact nature of the attraction has yet to be released by Gardaland, it has released a teaser video that shows park workers in a fog encountering a giant purple rock covered with mystic runes.