Upper Lot

The Studio Tour is what Universal Studios Hollywood is. It started in 1964 as a way of selling tickets to a working film studio, the theme park grew up around it, and it remains the one thing here that no other park on earth can copy. The route runs off the visitor side of the property and out onto the actual backlot — the standing exterior sets that productions still shoot on, with crew trucks and equipment carts parked where they happened to be that morning.

King Kong 360 3-D opened in 2010 on the site of the old King Kong Encounter, which burned down in the 2008 backlot fire. It is not a separate attraction — you cannot queue for it, and there is no way to ride it without riding the Studio Tour. The tram drives into a purpose-built tunnel, the doors close, and you are inside a Peter Jackson-directed sequence projected onto enormous curved screens on both sides at once.

Earthquake: The Big One has been on the Studio Tour since 1989, built around the 1974 disaster film. The tram pulls into a full-scale San Francisco BART station set and stops. What happens next is entirely practical — no screens, no projection, just hydraulics, water, fire and a great deal of steel.

Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift opened on September 16, 2026, on the Upper Lot. It is Universal Studios Hollywood's first high-speed outdoor roller coaster. Its 4,100-foot track runs over and under the Starway hillside at speeds up to 72 mph. Universal lists four launches, three inversions and forces up to 3.6 g.

Despicable Me Minion Mayhem opened at Universal Studios Hollywood in 2014, in the building that previously held Terminator 2: 3-D. The premise is a training program in Gru's laboratory that turns the audience into Minions, which is a sensible piece of design — it gives a screen simulator a reason to throw you around.

Super Silly Fun Land sits alongside Despicable Me Minion Mayhem and is styled as the seaside carnival from the first film. The main draw is a wet play area — jets, buckets, sprayers and slides that fire on a cycle — plus a small spinning ride, the Silly Swirly, that lifts and circles on an arm.

The Secret Life of Pets: Off the Leash opened in 2021 and is the only attraction built at Universal Studios Hollywood in recent memory that is not built around a screen. It is a trackless dark ride through a stylized New York apartment building and the streets around it, populated with a very large number of animated figures.

The DreamWorks Theatre opened in 2018 in the building that held Shrek 4-D for the previous fifteen years. It is a purpose-built effects theater — projection across a wide screen, in-seat motion, wind, water and scent — running a DreamWorks Animation property, most recently a Kung Fu Panda story.

WaterWorld has been running at Universal Studios Hollywood since 1995, which is remarkable given that the film it is based on is chiefly remembered as an expensive failure. The show outlived that reputation entirely. It is a live stunt production in a purpose-built lagoon amphitheater, with performers doing real work: high falls, fire burns, jet ski chases and hand-to-hand fighting, in front of a set that is destroyed and rebuilt daily.