Lotte World's massive new animatronic King Kong finally opened in Seoul
Lotte World Adventure in Seoul opened Kong X Godzilla: The Ride on July 24. It's the first attraction ever built around Legendary Entertainment's Monsterverse, and Lotte World says it's the largest single-attraction investment in the park's history, comfortably beating the $34 million spent on Pharaoh's Fury back in 2005.
Riders start at Base M-42, a fictional outpost for Monarch, the film franchise's monster-tracking agency, where an animatronic figure delivers a mission briefing before anyone boards. From there, eight guests at a time load into a trackless vehicle called a Heave and drop into Hollow Earth for an 11-minute run across a 320-meter indoor course. The vehicles move freely across the floor on wireless guidance, syncing to screens as long as 22 meters while Kong leaps waterfalls and fights off rival Titans.
The animatronic itself is a giant Kong figure that swings into view partway through the ride. At the right beat it roars, and the vibration is strong enough to feel through the floor of the vehicle. Lotte World says overseas visitors currently make up only about 15% of its guests, and a Hollywood-IP centerpiece this size is clearly aimed at growing that number.
Disney patents a way to make animatronics listen to a live actor instead of ignoring them
Right now, an Audio-Animatronics figure sharing a stage with a live performer runs on a fixed clock. The human has to hit their mark at the right second so their timing lines up with whatever the animatronic was already programmed to do. A Disney patent application published this week wants to flip that relationship.
The filing, titled "Methods for Alignment of Plan to Execution Using Multimodal Cues for Script-Based Performance Monitoring," describes a machine learning system that watches an actor's performance in real time and responds to it. Instead of the human adapting to the robot, the animatronic control would listen for cues in the script and trigger its own sound, lighting, or movement once it hears them, the same job a live stage crew does when calling cues off a performer.
Disney filed a second application the same week aimed at attraction maintenance rather than performance: a sensor-and-AI system that watches ride components over time and flags wear before it becomes a breakdown.
Neither filing names a specific show, and a patent application is a long way from an installed system. But the timing lines up with what Disney told investors days later. In its third-quarter earnings call, the company reported theme park revenue up 10% and operating income up 20% year over year, and CEO Josh D'Amaro called AI "a significant opportunity for our company to drive returns," pointing to AI-assisted design and simulation tools already being used to help build the new Disney park in Abu Dhabi.