July 24, 2026
Universal’s theme parks grew revenue 2.7% to $2.4 billion in the second quarter, Comcast Corporation (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) reported Thursday, but segment Adjusted EBITDA fell 5.1% to $609 million. It is the segment’s first EBITDA decline since Epic Universe opened, and management insists the reason is not the new park. “Turning to Parks, the operating environment has softened more than we anticipated,” Co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said on the call.
The specific turn came in Orlando, and it came recently. “Growth in Orlando came in below our expectations as attendance began to soften in June and has remained pressured into the third quarter,” CFO Jason Armstrong said. Cavanagh put the same date on it in his prepared remarks: attendance across the broader Orlando market began to soften in June, with “some temporary factors at work, including higher fuel prices and weaker consumer sentiment.”
The Weakening Macro Environment
Three months ago, on the Q1 call, Cavanagh told analysts the company had not yet seen higher oil prices reach the parks, then added the hedge that mattered: “that does not mean that it may not happen depending on the duration of the effect on price of gas, airline tickets, and so forth.” This quarter answered him. The pullback arrived in June, and it has followed the parks into July, and management describes it as an attendance problem rather than a spending problem. Management was careful to frame the cause as macro. Asked directly in the Q&A, Cavanagh described “essentially weakness in attendance” driven by “weakness in consumer sentiment and higher travel costs,” and said the company does not view it as “a permanent change in the outlook at all.”
Guests who come are spending, but fewer are coming. Comcast disclosed no attendance figures, so the size of “softer” is management’s word choice, not a number anyone can check.
Epic Is Delivering
None of the softness attaches to the new park, in management’s telling. “Specifically on Epic, we continue to see it doing what we wanted it to do. It’s delivering against our expectations,” Cavanagh said, crediting it with “driving higher per capita spend and strengthening broader Orlando” as “a true multi-destination resort.” His summary of the problem: “It’s an overall demand drop that’s hitting Orlando broadly.”
How bad is the demand drop? We’ll see soon. On Disney’s May call, CFO Hugh Johnston said the company had not “seen any change in consumer behavior from elevated gas prices thus far,” with Walt Disney World bookings pacing up. That was May, and Comcast dates the turn to June. Disney reports again on August 5, and that’s when we’ll see more about how widespread it is. If Disney’s Orlando numbers echo the June softening, this is a market story; if they do not, it is a Universal story.
Tension in Asia
Osaka is still struggling to get China tourists after Japan’s recent fallouts with China, and it showed up in the earnings. “The EBITDA decline was primarily driven by continued pressure at our Osaka park, where China-related travel restrictions are still impacting attendance,” Armstrong said. When inbound travel weakens, the available play is to sell harder to the local audience, and Universal Studios Japan just announced “Zanzō,” its first R-18 age-restricted attraction for Halloween Horror Nights. The limited-capacity experience is an upcharge that hasn’t been seen at USJ since 2019 with Hotel Albert. This allows the park to potentially get more from locals in a similar fashion to Six Flags with the Conjuring experience.
Betting on Halloween
And, of course, Universal Orlando is betting that Halloween Horror Nights will carry the next quarter. Halloween Horror Nights begins a 48-night run on August 28, matching its record length at its earliest-ever start. As we argued in Is Summer the New Shoulder Season, the industry has quietly moved its demand generation into the ticketed seasonal calendar, and 2026’s domestic summer arrived with almost nothing new in it. That left the base season with no cushion when sentiment turned. A June-July attendance dip lands squarely in the months the industry has stopped defending. What happens to Orlando attendance from August 28 forward is the first real test of whether the seasonal calendar can carry a park market through a soft macro stretch. Even Epic joins the fall calendar: Universal Nights, a separately ticketed after-hours event, runs two October Saturdays from $179.99.
Hollywood, whose Halloween slate is still filling in (Universal announced its first original Hollywood house of 2026 the day of the call), is still betting on the new coaster. Armstrong said, “we do not expect a more meaningful improvement until the new Fast and Furious rollercoaster opens later this year,” (a coaster still without an announced date inside its official summer 2026 window).
No Answers About The Split
When the spin-off was announced, I wrote that inside standalone NBCUniversal, park capital competes against Peacock, and that the first standalone capital guidance would answer which one gets fed. Asked by JPMorgan’s Sebastiano Petti about leverage targets, dividend policy, and capital-return framework for the two companies, Armstrong said there was “nothing to add relative to what we said three weeks ago upon announcement,” beyond the intention to give both companies “strong investment-grade balance sheets.”
The competition got more interesting in the meantime. Peacock posted its first-ever quarterly profit, $189 million in Adjusted EBITDA on 2 million new subscribers, reaching 48 million. A profitable Peacock is a stronger claimant on investment than the cash sink it used to be.
Meanwhile, the one hard capex number fell: Content & Experiences capital spending was down 20.4% to $584 million in the quarter, which the release attributes primarily to lapping Epic Universe’s opening. Share repurchases are paused as of July 1 and expected to stay paused through the separation. Moody’s has the rating under review for downgrade, and S&P has it on CreditWatch negative, both citing the split’s concentration effects. The first standalone NBCUniversal capex plan, likely arriving in the spin’s Form 10 and investor materials over the next year, remains the document that decides whether the parks-first pitch is a capital commitment or a marketing frame.
Management’s long view has not moved. “It is a long-cycle business. We’re, again, one of two players,” Cavanagh said in the Q&A, pointing to the UK park among the projects down the road. His prepared remarks made the same case with “Universal Kids Resort now open in Frisco” as the newest proof point on the runway. The press release strikes the same note: “While we are seeing some near-term softness in Theme Parks, we remain confident in the long-term opportunity.”
