Warner Bros. To Launch Connected Superhero Universe In Abu Dhabi Theme Park

A connected DC superhero universe is coming to Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi.

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Warner Bros. is developing multiple rides at its theme park in Abu Dhabi which are connected by a single storyline involving the studio’s DC Comics characters including Superman and his arch-rival Lex Luthor.

The development will add an additional layer of realism to what is already one of the world’s most immersive theme parks. Unlike most movie parks, Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi doesn’t give guests a look behind the scenes of movie-making. Instead, it is designed to put them into the worlds where the characters actually live. The park has a powerful trick up its sleeve which enables it to pull this off.

In order to shield visitors from the searing heat in Abu Dhabi, Warner Bros. World is entirely indoors. This also enables its 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. Its six lands are largely home to cartoon characters, except for two which are where the superpowered stars of DC Comics supposedly live.

Batman and his nemesis the Joker strut around the dark and dingy Gotham City which looks like it has come straight from a scene in the caped crusader’s movies. Some of the windows in the building facades in Gotham are cracked while others are boarded up or have curtains which are only partly pulled to. Plant pots stand on balconies, birdcages can be seen through windows, bricks look weathered and soot-stained, there’s graffiti on the walls, posters are peeling off them, fake manhole covers are embedded in the cracked tarmac and shadows of moving people are even projected onto the windows of the train in the station. Sounds of police sirens in the distance and crashing waves play from hidden speakers and the only thing missing is garbage blowing down the street in the wind.

In stark contrast, Superman and his pals from the Justice League can be found next door in the bright and airy Metropolis where the soaring silvery skyscrapers seem to have a golden glow courtesy of an ingenious artificial sunset which is projected onto the curved ceiling and seems to stretch endlessly into the horizon.

Adding to the immersion, as I have reported, most of the rides in the park are hidden behind internal walls so the entrances to them can be hidden behind the building facades. The queue for the flagship ride in Gotham winds through the lobby of the headquarters to Wayne Enterprises, the company owned by Batman’s alter ego, Bruce Wayne.

Over in Metropolis, a scale recreation of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles is where you find Green Lantern: Galactic Odyssey, a breathtaking simulator which starts off like a planetarium show but turns into a trip across the cosmos. There’s even an artificial subway entrance right outside the door with a map of the Metropolis transportation network on the wall.

Until recently, a 3D show themed to Superman played inside the monolithic Daily Planet with its Art Deco, angular architecture. That has been closed to make way for Superman Up and Away, which is due to open in 2028 and is set to give riders an actual sensation of flight.

The attraction is a so-called flying coaster meaning that riders lie face down strapped into seats attached to vehicles suspended below the track. Reflecting the reporting of local theme park tracker Desert Thrills, construction schematics suggest that the track will rise in a point at one stage enabling the coaster cars to launch up it giving the riders the feeling of weightlessness at the top before they glide back down. If this proves to be accurate it would be a first for a flying coaster. That’s not all.

The ride is set to continue the story which began in the latest addition to the park. Called Kryptonite Collider, the ride sits on the streets of Metropolis on the site of a former grab-and-go food outlet and is formed from several huge robot arms which rotate like the hands of a clock around a spinning central column. Seats are attached to the ends of the arms and narrowly miss each other as they rotate. It opened in July and has had a magic touch.

As all of the rides in Metropolis were hidden behind internal walls, the land often seemed quiet but Kryptonite Collider has brought much-needed motion and activity to the streets. That’s just the start of the story.

The ride system behind Kryptonite Collider is commonly found in fairground-style parks but you would be hard-pressed to tell it. As I have reported, Miral, the operator of Warner Bros. World and the other parks on Abu Dhabi’s Yas Island, has made a name for itself by ensuring that each of its attractions is more eye-catching than its predecessors. Kryptonite Collider is no exception.

With its wildly-spinning shiny robotic arms, the ride looks like a real-life Transformer that has crash-landed on the streets of Metropolis. There is good reason for this.

According to the story told on screens in the queue, the machine has been created by Luthor in order to give ordinary people super powers so that the public doesn’t have to rely on the Justice League. It is said to be powered by Kryptonite, the glowing green rock which can incapacitate the man of steel. Perhaps surprisingly, there is a science behind the story.

Talking on a behind the scenes tour of Warner Bros. World last week attended by this author, the park’s general manager Hind Galadari explained that “we noticed in Metropolis we were lacking a villain. Gotham City is full of villains and they are scurrying around the city but in Metropolis, for me, it felt a little too polished so we needed to mess it up a little bit. So what did we want to do? We introduced Lex Luthor.”

Galadari is a supremely-skilled manager with a 15-year career which began with the Dubai International Film Festival. She went on to work at many of the most popular attractions in the Middle East including Dubai’s permanent world’s fair Global Village, Dubai Parks and Resorts and the acclaimed Expo 2020 where she rose through the ranks to become deputy head of pavilions and exhibitions operations.

Galadari joined Miral in 2024, the year after Warner Bros. World became the first theme park in the Middle East to appear on the Global Attractions Attendance report from the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) when 1.4 million visitors streamed through its turnstiles. Since then it has gone from strength to strength with its attendance rising to 1.6 million in 2024. Last year Yas Island welcomed a record 44 million visitors and, as I reported today, the upward trend has continued this year despite the region being in the grip of war.

Thanks to Galadari’s magic touch, earlier this year Warner Bros. World became the first attraction in the Middle East to win the Liseberg Applause Award – the themed entertainment industry’s equivalent of top honors at the Oscars. It is far from the park’s only accolade.

Attractions Magazine described it as “the most elaborate all-indoor Hollywood-inspired theme park on earth” while Coasterforce added that it is “incredibly themed” and Attractions 360 said it is their “favorite theme park in Dubai and Abu Dhabi”. However, it’s immersive atmosphere is only part of the magic formula.

As Galadari explained, listening to guest feedback is also crucial. “Sometimes they are actually asking ‘I would love a more family experience’ or ‘I would love more thrill’ so we try to cater to all those bases but we do follow trends very much so and that’s how we know which one are we going to spend a little more on.” Miral has committed to investing $3.3 billion (AED12 billion) over the next five years in new rides for Warner Bros. World and the nearby Ferrari World park as well as building new hotels, including the extension to its flagship property that I revealed in trade title Blooloop in April.

It’s easy to see where the money was spent on Kryptonite Collider. As renowned roller coaster expert Lift Hills and Thrills says, the “theming around this ride is second to none.” It is no exaggeration.

No stone has been left unturned in Miral’s quest for realism. Model meteorites with glowing green seams in them are embedded in the surrounding sidewalk and buildings. Smoke rises from the rocks as they fizz and crackle. Illuminated green pipes connect them to struts around the ride containing green spotlights which shine onto the riders as they spin around, rising and falling on the rotating arms.

Riders are meant to get their powers from the Kryptonite beam and this story has formed the basis of a viral video marketing campaign which has been broadcast in local movie theaters and online. In a masterstroke from Miral’s marketing maestro, Badr Bourji, the advert seemed to interrupt actual trailers for DC movies in theaters as he explained to Campaign Middle East’s esteemed editor Anup Oommen.

The slick promotional video sits seamlessly in the world of last year’s Superman movie as well as Warner Bros. World’s recreation of Metropolis. It has the caliber of a Holywood movie thanks to its director William McGregor who created Cannes Lions award winning campaigns with brands such as Cartier, BMW, Ford, Google and Energizer. This led to him directing big budget fantasy shows for HBO, Netflix and Apple including two episodes of period drama The Buccaneers and an upcoming mini series adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure story Treasure Island starring David Oyelowo, Hayley Atwell and Jack Huston.

It doesn’t stop there as the Kryptonite Collider video was produced by regional film production house Déjà Vu which was also behind the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism’s Hollywood-esque campaign starring Chris Hemsworth and his wife Elsa Pataky. The visuals in the Kryptonite Collider campaign wouldn’t look out of place on the big screen as they were created by T-VFX which worked on Jason Statham films Working Man and The Beekeeper.

Luthor also looks the part as he is played by brooding bald English actor Ian Mcintyre from the BBC’s Casualty show and the upcoming Amazon MGM Studios Red, White & Royal Wedding starring Uma Thurman and He-Man himself Nicholas Galitzine.

Given that the campaign and attraction pack such a powerful punch it makes sense that they are just the start of the story. So far, there has been little connection between the rides in Metropolis with the biggest link being that Superman and Green Lantern both appear in a Justice League attraction. That is all about to change.

Talking on the tour, Miral’s creative production director Corrado Campanelli revealed that Kryptonite Collider is the “first step of a story that is going to be explored further more in the future so there is more of this coming up.”

Asked if the story told in Kryptonite Collider will be continued in the Superman roller coaster, he confirmed that “it is a continuation of the same story” and added that “there will be other development of that story, not just with the Superman ride.”

William Wheeler, senior project director for Miral says that “the generation of this Lex is the same generation of that Superman so it is a continuation of it and you will see the story develop as we get closer to Superman.” Emphasizing the permanence of this development he says that “Lex Luthor has moved into Metropolis and of course where Lex comes along, later comes trouble.”

This kind of connective tissue between attractions has been used to great effect by Disney at its Avengers Campus theme park lands which are based on its Marvel Cinematic Universe movies.

In the Spider-Man Web Slingers attraction at Disney’s California Adventure, riders fire virtual webs at giant screens showing an army of computer-animated arachnids crawling on the other Marvel rides in the land.

Over at Hong Kong Disneyland, the connectivity is taken a step further. Its Iron Man-themed flight simulator gives guests the impression they are flying alongside the armored Avenger as he stops enemy nanobots from breaking into his monolithic Stark Tower. This directly ties in to the storyline of the neighboring Ant-Man and The Wasp: Nano Battle shooting range ride. During the queue, guests are told that while Iron Man is protecting his headquarters he has called on his superpowered pals Ant-Man and The Wasp to deal with the nanobots which are attacking a nearby building. Disneyland Paris even gets in on the action as it has a restaurant set inside Iron Man’s workshop with blueprints on the wall for the Iron Wing ship which supposedly flies guests on the adventure in Hong Kong.

Of course, toys of the ship are on sale in the stores in the park and Lex Luthor themed products are also on their way to Warner Bros. World. Graham Moore, senior director of entertainment operations for Miral adds that “we are currently on the hunt for a Lex Luthor” character actor to roam around Metropolis for photo ops.

It will be the icing on the cake as Kryptonite Collider has already “achieved everything beyond what the original project objectives were,” says Wheeler. “People used to just walk past this area on the main walkway. Now they are stopped in their tracks, they are riding the ride, taking pictures.” He adds that “with this out in the open you’re holding hundreds of people in this space and you’re creating a reason to come to this area of the park.” That really is a happy ending.

Additional research by Chris Sylt