Executives announced the project Tuesday with much fanfare, spraying confetti and hoisting mugs of the wizardly brew butter beer.
The attraction, based on the Warner Bros. movies about the boy wizard in J.K. Rowling’s novels, will create more than 1,000 jobs at Universal and even more indirectly from an expected boost in tourism, officials said.
At the same time, Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter will get an expansion.
Since the Harry Potter attraction opened in Florida in June of last year, company executives have said attendance has jumped by about 50 percent, but did not give raw figures.
”It was a game changer for us and frankly for Orlando,” Universal Studios president Ron Meyer told reporters after an announcement at the Universal Studios Hollywood.
”The expansion in Orlando will make it that much more of a must-see, and we’ll have the same experience here.”
Executives did not immediately detail their plans for the Hollywood park, but Meyer said there was enough room to expand.
”We’re not landlocked,” Meyer said. ”We’re (on) 400 acres on this lot and 200 of them are still not developed.”
Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said he was told that a live concert venue, Gibson Amphitheatre, would be scrapped to make way for the attraction.
He said it would open around 2014, but officials did not give a date.
The widely expected announcement happened in typically dressed-up Hollywood style, complete with staff wearing scarves representing the various houses of the fictional wizard’s school, Hogwarts, beneath a theater marquee that said, ”Hogwarts is coming to Hollywood.”
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