Niles: Disneyland, Universal focus on after-hours in 2025

At theme parks, anything is possible. You even can put more than 365 days into a year.

When Knott’s Berry Farm launched its Halloween Haunt — now Knott’s Scary Farm — in 1973, it established a new model for selling theme park tickets. Sell customers one ticket for the day, and then sell them another for a special, after-hours event at night. Dayparting has become a lucrative way for parks effectively to add more dates to the calendar by creating more opportunities to sell admission.

It’s not just for the Halloween season anymore. Disneyland and Universal Studios Hollywood are embracing dayparting in 2025, with both parks scheduling multiple evenings of after-hours events in the first months of the year. Disneyland has sold out eight evenings of its Disneyland After Dark: Sweethearts’ Nite event this month and next, with two Disneyland After Dark: 90s Nites coming in March, followed by eight Star Wars Nites in April and May, and two Pride Nites in June.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios Hollywood is getting ready to host its after-hours Universal Fan Fest Nights on 12 nights in April and May. This event will bring several new and returning franchises to the park, including Back to the Future, Dungeons & Dragons, Jujutsu Kaisen, One Piece and Star Trek. The event will include the park’s The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Super Nintendo World attractions, as well.

Not every theme park can pull off extra-charge after-hours events. These are a bad fit for a park such as Legoland that appeals mostly to families who aren’t going to want to keep their kids up late at night and into the early hours of the morning.

Nor do after-hours events work well when a park fails to provide a justification for them. One of the reasons why I love Halloween events, and am looking forward to Universal Fan Fest Nights, is to see what a park’s creative team can do with different franchises that do not have permanent rides or shows in the park.

Dungeons & Dragons, for example, offers amazing potential for a live-action, interactive experience in a theme park. But an after-hours event can be a winner selling nostalgia as well as innovation. Disney’s events often lean into rare and overlooked characters from the company’s past, such as will be featured at the upcoming 90s Nite.

Disney and Universal have a huge advantage here, with their extensive libraries of owned or licensed franchises. They also employ large creative teams that can program the walk-through experiences, stage shows and photo ops that make these types of events a must-do for dedicated fans.

But the biggest advantage that Disney and Universal have in staging after-hours events is the fact that their parks are so often filled during the day. When Knott’s programs its Peanuts Celebration or Ghost Town Alive, or legacy Six Flags parks do DC Comics festivals, they program them as part of their normal operations, to boost daily attendance. They just don’t have the baseline daily demand to justify splitting those days.

Ultimately, dayparting is another way that the rich get richer in the theme park business.