Is This Theme Park Getting The First ‘Wonder Woman’ Ride Outside North America?

Following a popular run of rides at Six Flags, Wonder Woman is finally set to get her first attraction outside North America (Photo by Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)

MediaNews Group via Getty Images

Wonder Woman, DC Comics’ most famous female super hero, could be getting her own ride in one of the world’s most immersive theme parks according to comments from Warner Bros., which owns the rights to the character.

Created in 1941 by American psychologist William Moulton Marston and artist Harry G. Peter, the Amazonian hero has super strength and wields a golden lasso which makes anyone who it touches tell the truth.

Despite being one of DC’s most popular characters, Wonder Woman stars in surprisingly few of her own theme park rides. All of them were launched in the wake of the 2017 Patty Jenkins movie which had Gal Gadot in the title role. It debuted to critical acclaim and grossed $823 million at the box office leading to a flurry of rides.

They are all in theme parks run by Six Flags which was owned by Warner Bros. until 1998 when it was sold to its current New York Stock Exchange-listed parent company. The deal included exclusive, long-term licensing rights to use Warner Bros. and DC characters in Six Flags’ parks and it has made the most of this.

Several Six Flags parks feature DC Universe lands which are home to restaurants, bars, shops and, of course, rides, themed to its characters. Anticipation for the Wonder Woman movie was so great that the first ride based on the character was given the green light during development of the picture and opened at Six Flags America in Maryland just 11 days after it premiered.

Called Wonder Woman Lasso of Truth, the ride is a standard amusement park attraction which will be familiar to anyone who has visited a fun fair. It features seats suspended from a carousel which rises up a tower and spins at 40 miles per hour causing the chairs to swing out. At a height of 242 feet it was the tallest ride in the park’s history but Six Flags didn’t stop there.

A year later a ride with the same name opened at New Jersey’s Six Flags Great Adventure. Its version of Wonder Woman Lasso of Truth is the world’s tallest and fastest rotating pendulum ride – another attraction commonly found at fun fairs. It sees riders sitting on seats attached to the edges of a huge circular disc fixed to the bottom of a giant pendulum. The disc rotates as the steel strut swings 172 feet into the air.

In 2018 Six Flags also debuted the first-ever roller coaster themed to Wonder Woman at its park in San Antonio, Texas. Called Wonder Woman Golden Lasso Coaster, it fittingly features a golden single rail instead of the two that steel tracks are usually formed from. It too spawned a counterpart which opened in 2022 at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California and is the world’s longest and tallest single-rail roller coaster.

With 3,300 feet of track it is far longer than its predecessor and doesn’t share its name as it is called Wonder Woman Flight of Courage. The only other ride themed to the iconic character is simply called Wonder Woman and is one of the attractions at Six Flags Mexico. Ingeniously, the seats of the ride are suspended to the sides of the track and rotate as it hurtles around the rails.

There is a also Wonder Woman themed drop slide in Spain’s Parque Warner Beach water park and a live show starring the hero at Warner Bros. Movie World on Australia’s Gold Coast. However, the rides are only in the North American parks and are largely unthemed. The roller coasters have bare tracks and steel struts with the logos being the most obvious way to tell that they are themed to the character. It’s a very different story in Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi.

The studio’s outpost in Abu Dhabi’s Yas Island is run by local leisure manager Miral which has made a name for itself as one of the world’s leading theme park operators thanks to the quality, innovation and service standards in its attractions.

The wizards who developed Warner Bros. World come from Thinkwell, a division of design giants TAIT. Founded in 2001 by former Universal Studios park designers who didn’t want to relocate when the company moved its creative team from the west coast to Orlando, Thinkwell went on to develop some of the industry’s most immersive and engaging attractions. It has designed attractions for Universal Studios Singapore and the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in Hollywood but perhaps its best-known work is on the wildly-successful behind the scenes Harry Potter tours.

In stark contrast, Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi turns traditional movie parks on their heads. Instead of being a behind the scenes tour, it plunges visitors into environments where the stars of the silver screen are meant to live. The park has lands themed to Batman’s stomping ground of Gotham City as well as Metropolis, home to Wonder Woman, Superman and their Justice League team mates.

The entire park is indoors to shield visitors from Abu Dhabi’s intense heat which often soars above 110 degrees in summer. The structure is a dream ticket in more ways than one.

Cleverly, the major rides in Warner Bros. World are hidden behind internal walls which are designed to look like caves, skyscrapers and a row of houses. It enables the rides to blend in seamlessly with the elaborate environments. In Gotham City some of the windows in the building facades are cracked whilst others are boarded up or have curtains which are only partly pulled together. Bricks look weathered and soot-stained, there’s graffiti on the walls, posters are peeling off them and shadows of moving people are even projected onto the windows of the train in the station.

Being indoors allows the scenery to be more elaborate than if it was outdoors as there is no danger of it getting damaged by wind, overgrown with foliage or faded in the sun. It allowed Thinkwell to create the kind of detailed scenery which many other parks can only dream of. This attention to detail extends equally to the rides.

A dirty-looking spooky circus tent in Gotham contains trials set by Batman’s arch-enemy the Joker including a corridor which seems to be turning and a maze of mirrors that are so polished they seem to be endless. The rides are cleverly based on the beloved cartoon versions of the heroes, not the ones in the recent movies which have had more of a mixed response.

The highlight is a ride which sits inside a miniature version of the iconic Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles. As you would expect in real life, it is set just off the street in the park and has a domed lobby supported by soaring white columns. The queue winds past statues of famous astronomers and plaques about key scientific developments as you would get in an actual observatory. The reward at the end of the line is a pair of 3D goggles which guests are given before they are seated on a banked bench in a darkened room.

Themed to the Green Lantern character, the attraction starts out like a planetarium show but abruptly turns into a 3D adventure thanks to the seats being attached to a robot arm so that they appear to float in front of one of the world’s largest domed screens. It is 124 feet in diameter and shows footage in pin-sharp 4K resolution.

The ride is like being thrust into an ‘80s sci-fi film as you soar over psychedelically-colored planets and duel with fire-breathing dragons. It’s a spellbinding experience as you get blasted with mist and air when creatures roar whilst smells of pine are pumped in as you skim over alien forests. The experience is up there with Disney’s esteemed Avatar Flight of Passage attraction which is powered by a similar system.

Down the street is a roving simulator ride themed to the Justice League and although Wonder Woman briefly appears on 3D screens in it, she doesn’t have her own ride. It might not stay that way for long.

Talking in September 2020, Jess Priore, Warner Bros.’ vice president of global themed entertainment, discussed the development of Warner Bros. World. He explained that one of the challenges was “determining which of these super heroes and super villains to use. And so the cool thing is we’ve got so many available to us you know that in the future I’m really excited because we’re going to be looking at new attractions so you know, for example, Aquaman or Wonder Woman, you know, they don’t have marquee attractions yet but we definitely have the ability to add those in the future.”

Priore’s comments have never been reported before and they have become all the more relevant this year as Miral announced the first expansion to Warner Bros. World since it opened in 2018. This came in April when it announced that over the coming years the park will swing open the doors to two new DC attractions, though it didn’t say what they will be themed to.

Of course, Warner Bros.’ desire to bring Wonder Woman and Aquaman to the park doesn’t mean that either of them will feature in the new expansion. Plans could have changed and the characters could appear in future phases of expansion. However, if the studio’s comments indicate what is in store for the park, Wonder Woman seems the most likely one of the duo to appear thanks to the character’s popularity and commercial success. Perhaps crucially, she is on her way back to the silver screen.

In October 2022 DC took its biggest step in modern times with the hiring of its new joint bosses – acclaimed film producer Peter Safran and James Gunn, arguably one of the most talented directors in Hollywood. A Marvel Studios veteran, Gunn quickly cast a powerful spell on DC with his smash hit Superman movie which grossed $615.8 million at the box office this summer.

Gunn proved he has a magic touch at Marvel when he turned the little-known Guardians of the Galaxy characters into one of the studio’s most beloved and valuable franchises. It became a core part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Gunn has already said that he is hard at work on creating a similar interconnected series of films for DC.

In June he told EW that “we’re working on Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman’s being written right now.” The following month Variety claimed that according to studio sources DC is fast-tracking a new Wonder Woman movie which won’t feature Gadot. In the same month Gunn told Extra that Andor star Adria Arjona “would be a great Wonder Woman”. She starred in Gunn’s 2016 action horror movie The Belko Experiment though there has not been any announcement on whether she will be joining the Justice League as its leading lady.

Three of the team’s leading lights – Wonder Woman, Superman and the Green Lantern – often headline adverts for Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi and the Amazonian is the only one of them who doesn’t have a ride in the park.

There is no doubt that construction on the expansion is already underway. Themeparx, the world’s leading site which tracks theme park construction, has posted photos of the barriers around the perimeter of the site which say ‘preparing for a heroic arrival’. A construction sign on the site describes it as the ‘Warner Bros. World Phase 2 Expansion’ and lists TAIT as the creative consultant.

The site is adjacent to the area in the park between Gotham City and Metropolis which was once occupied with washrooms. Photos on Themeparx show that the area is now covered by barriers bearing the logo for ‘Lexcorp’, the fictional company run by Superman’s arch rival Lex Luthor. The barriers indicate that this area will be the entrance to the new attractions and although the logo suggests they will have a connection to Superman, it doesn’t rule out Wonder Woman as she too has battled Luthor.

The park is already home to a highly immersive 360 degree Superman show so it seems unlikely that either of the new attractions will be based directly on the Man of Steel despite the success of his new movie. His cousin Supergirl is however a possibility as a new movie about her will be released next year and she too has crossed paths with Luthor. Furthermore, in June, Forbes Middle East reported that the expansion will include “a new Gotham City experience” suggesting that it could be based on Batman.

What is clear is that expansion has been planned in from start. At the park’s opening in 2018, Miral’s chairman, Mohamed Al Mubarak, told this author’s colleague in an interview for the Daily Telegraph that “these projects are projects that we will continue to invest in. In the theme park industry, every couple of years you want to re-invest and bring in a brand new ride or a brand new world and that’s how we work.”

Aside from the theme, the other key question is what kind of attractions will be built. A clue could come from what was excluded from Warner Bros. World during the design phase. Thinkwell designed the park’s attraction lineup to complement Yas Island’s neighboring Ferrari World theme park. Ferrari World is famous for its roller coasters, which currently include the fastest in the world, so Warner Bros. World was designed more with families in mind.

It has left a gap in Warner Bros. World for a high thrill ride and, in particular, a drop tower. When the park was being designed there was a drop tower in the middle of Ferrari World so Warner Bros. World didn’t duplicate the ride format. However, the tower has since been removed opening the door for its neighbour to implement something similar.

That’s not all folks as Warner Bros. World isn’t the only park on Yas Island which is expanding. In April Miral also announced that Ferrari World will also be getting a new signature ride which will have four worldwide records. It comes at just the right time as the upcoming Six Flags Qiddiya City park in nearby Saudi Arabia is soon set to take the title of having the world’s tallest, longest, and fastest roller coaster.

Not to be outdone, not only is Miral adding attractions to Ferrari World and Warner Bros. World but it is also developing a land themed to Harry Potter. That’s in addition to making Yas Island the home of Disney’s seventh resort. All told, Yas Island is becoming the world’s biggest hub of theme park construction and in this industry that really is the magic formula.