An indoor/outdoor boat ride sounds amazing. And if they could work it into being an *actual* attraction with screens, sets, etc. on scale of say, Jurassic park without a drop for the live parts and a toned down kung fu panda in the screened indoor portion? Awesome.
That said- the realization of that will be difficult. You will absolutely have road access between the parks; and you'll almost assuredly have some office spaces. Hogwarts express is raised where vehicles can go underneath. A boat ride would be tricky to say the least for that allowance.
It would likely need to be a unique ride system that went from boat in water, to an omnimover-like track that can be elevated over backstage park access and lowered back into water at the other park.
Indoor part would obviously be needed at the junction behind stardust racers and backstage, but could truly have some amazing reveals once exposed to the land from your screened in tunnels. My hope is if LotR is put in Epic that the reveal from the park hopping from gate 4 would be planned from day one.
This is the major reason I would prefer LotR to Wicked. While Wicked feels like a better fit for Epic, it doesn't feel grand in scale enough to receive two major lands between 2 parks. Maybe it could - Emerald city in one and munchkinland in another. But compared to LotR, it pales in comparison to locations, scale and appeal.
Yellow could be LotR - 1 major E and a show or C/D. Red is the expansion area where the park hopping queue, show building and load/unload could take place with the blue line showing connection to park 4. Talk about an easy pitch to shareholders when they can show what park hopping did to profits at USF/IoA to do simultaneously with a new land.
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