D&D Coming to Universal Studios Hollywood in 2025
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The Universal Studios Hollywood theme park is rolling the dice on a new event that will see the Dungeons & Dragons franchise become a major part of its upcoming 2025 Fan Fest Nights, a series of after-hours programming that celebrates three of pop culture’s biggest brands. It’s all part of the continuing expansion of D&D into main stream culture, thanks in larger part to Stranger Things, Critical Role and the Honor Among Thieves film.
So just what can D&D fans expect from these upcoming events? Below, we break out everything we know so far.
What is Fan Fest Nights?
Fan Fest Nights is a series of events that will take place in the Spring of 2025 at the Universal Studios Hollywood amusement park in Los Angeles. The events are focused on three pop culture franchises: Dungeons & Dragons, Back to the Future and Star Trek, with each franchise getting its own separate night. It’s describe as “a limited-time, after-hours experience, exclusive to Universal Studios Hollywood, that will showcase a dynamic line-up of captivating, immersive in-world experiences along with engaging celebratory activations throughout the theme park, from live entertainment to cosplay, inviting guests to embrace their favorite characters and share their enthusiasm with like-minded fans.”
Notably, Fan Fest Nights are being developed by the creators of the popular Hollywood Horror Nights events which also take place at Universal Studios in the fall and include custom events focused around popular horror and sci-fi franchises like Insidious, A Quiet Place and Ghostbusters. That particular series of events includes haunted houses, exclusive merchandise and other in-person events leading up to Halloween.
Final Thoughts
It’ll be interesting to see how well the Dungeons & Dragons brand translates into an immersive experience like Fan Fest Nights, especially in the face of much larger brands like Star Trek. The fact that it’s being included, however, speaks to just how far into the mainstream D&D has made it in the past few years.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story in the days ahead and will update this page with new information as it’s made available. In the meantime, you can sign up for notifications and tickets for the event via Universal Fan Fest Nights.
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Cameron Nichols is a Senior Editor who lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and has been playing D&D since the early 90s, when he was introduced by his older brother and cut his teeth on AD&D 2nd Edition. Since then he’s played virtually every RPG he could get his nerdy little mitts on (including a weird Goth phase in the early 2000s when he rocked Vampire: The Masquerade pretty hard). His favorite D&D campaign setting is the Forgotten Realms and his favorite character to play was a Half-Orc Barbarian named Grug (who was unfortunately devoured by a gelatinous cube).
