It has to become a spectacle in the overall storytelling. Gilmore: Well, for us, every detail is important, so it's not even just an entrance. So did that make it a lot fun to design this? I saw the pictures of the entrance to Gringotts, and how you bring people in and immerse them before they sit down. IGN: As you’ve established with the first part of the Wizarding World, there's a presentation to everything you don't just walk up to a ride. The entrance to the Escape From Gringotts ride is a detailed replication of the Gringotts lobby, as seen in the Potter films. So those were kind of our guiding doctrines.
She helped us develop some of the ideas even further, but really we stuck very religiously to her fiction and what was established in the movies. So when Universal and Warner Brothers created the concepts for the Diagon Alley park, we took those concepts to her, and she was very happy with it. They're always our master plan for everything we do. Did she have some specific ideas and thoughts along the way as you were constructing the expansion? Gilmore: Really, her books are what guide us. I know, obviously, she consults on all of this. With the Gringotts Bank, we knew we had to have the Gringotts ride. IGN: Was it a pretty easy decision as far as what the ride would be? I'll tell you, I remember seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 in the theater and thinking, during the Gringotts sequence, "That needs to be a ride!" Gilmore: It's funny, lots of people have had that same thought, and it kind of shows that it's really the perfect ride for this land. Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) can be seen helping ward off the Gringotts dragon on the ride. Even though the first one is really good, we just wanted to go further, and I think we've achieved that. We went in wanting to increase the scale of the buildings, make the rides more exciting and really just make the guest experience a whole lot better as well. So we came into this project with huge ideas, having learned so much from the first Harry Potter theme park.
Did that make it both exciting and nerve-racking wanting to match that? Alan Gilmore: We were really excited but also really interested in how we could up the standards and really raise the bar. IGN Movies: You’ve had such success with the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.