Thursday, September 17, 2009

Universal Lifts the Veil on a Harry Potter Park
By Brooks Barnes in The New York Times, September 15, 2009

LOS ANGELES — The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the keenly anticipated Florida theme park, will open in the spring and allow visitors to tour Hogwarts, buy quidditch gear and drink butterbeer.

Left - An illustration of Hogwarts Castle in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Universal’s planned theme park in Orlando, Fla.

Universal Orlando unveiled some details about the park, a 20-acre addition to its Islands of Adventure property, on Tuesday in a Web presentation. The resort, co-owned by NBC Universal and the Blackstone Group, secured the theme park rights to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books in May 2007, but has been silent about specific plans until now.
The so-called theme park within a theme park will be faithful to the visual landscapes of the Harry Potter films produced by Warner Brothers, which licensed the rights to Universal after a flirtation with the Walt Disney Company. “We’ve tried to include something from every book,” Alan Gilmore, an art director for the films who is helping to oversee the park designs, said in an interview.

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