After three years of painstaking work, Universal Studios Hollywood recently pulled off a seemingly impossible feat: It built a 72-mile-per-hour, looping roller coaster with spinning “Fast & Furious” cars — that barely makes a sound.
Universal had good reason to obsess. Residential neighborhoods press against the theme park, and its own movie studio operates alongside it. To silence the ride, Universal went so far as to fill the 4,100-foot track with pea gravel, muting the vibrations that give coasters their roar.
When riderless testing began last month, residents in nearby Toluca Lake were delighted, with several calling the attraction “whisper quiet.”
Then came the riders.
Every 30 seconds or so, for 10 hours straight, according to interviews with more than a dozen homeowners, the air is now filled with the sound of humans who fear they’re in mortal peril.
“Screams — bloodcurdling screams,” said Craig Strong, who has lived near Universal Studios Hollywood for 25 years. “Some people can hear it inside their homes with the windows closed.”
One angry resident said she could hear the screams even after removing her hearing aids. Another worried about her livelihood: She teaches meditation from home.
“We’re accustomed to some theme park noise, but the screaming is new, and it’s impossible to tune out,” said Judith Angel, who has lived nearby for 38 years. “Our brains are designed to respond to screaming. It’s biology.”
Neighbors have one demand. Universal must somehow find a way to muffle its very happy customers.
It would be easy to dismiss this as another chapter in the long history of neighborhood noise disputes in America. But the predicament underscores Universal’s longstanding challenge — how do you expand one of the world’s busiest theme parks when homes and a working movie studio sit almost on top of it? Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift was supposed to demonstrate that Universal had figured out how to overcome constraints.
Comcast, which owns the park, has been counting on Hollywood Drift to revive attendance and compete with an expanding Disneyland to the south. Universal Studios Hollywood attracted 8.8 million visitors in 2024, down 10 percent from 2023, according to the Themed Entertainment Association, which has yet to release 2025 figures.
Jason Armstrong, Comcast’s chief financial officer, told analysts in July that business had improved, “though we do not expect a more meaningful improvement until the new Fast & Furious roller coaster opens.” Universal declined to say how much the ride cost. Theme park analysts say attractions of this size and complexity typically cost $200 million or more.
As of Friday, Hollywood Drift was still in “technical rehearsals,” according to Universal, with no opening date beyond what the company has said since February: “summer.” Universal declined to make executives available for interviews but said in an email to neighborhood groups that audio measurements showed the ride was “operating in compliance with sound ordinance requirements.”
Universal added that it was nonetheless “exploring additional measures to further lessen sound levels experienced in adjacent neighborhoods.” Workers have begun expanding a sound wall. Universal also said it would stop running the coaster at 7 p.m. during the testing period and at 10 p.m. during Halloween Horror Nights, when the park is open as late as 2 a.m.
Universal took screaming into account from the start. Using computer modeling, ride designers mapped where screams were most likely to occur and incorporated defenses. Hollywood Drift was built with two “scream screens,” half-pipe-like glass shields meant to “encase sound at the source,” Universal has said. There is also a 940-foot sound wall made with Acoustiblok, a dense, rubbery material used to insulate buildings near airports.
The coaster’s spinning cars were enlisted: Universal said they were programmed to turn riders’ mouths away from nearby homes at “key scream moments.”
Universal even mounted speakers near the coaster site and played recordings of a roller coaster at a Florida park. Engineers wanted to study how sound traveled down the steep hillside.
What worked in computer models, however, has proved less effective against actual lungs.
Now residents are making noise of their own, flooding elected officials with complaints and demanding that neighborhood councils, which serve as conduits to City Hall, get involved. One coalition said it had hired its own sound consultants. Another said it had approached law firms to find out what representation would cost.
“I have a feeling this isn’t going to be over anytime soon,” said Leonard R. Garner, who has lived next to Universal for 28 years.
Toluca Lake was developed in the 1920s and became a Hollywood haven, attracting stars like Bette Davis and moguls like Roy O. Disney. The entertainment connection endures: Ray Romano and Rick Dees, the radio countdown king, have made their homes there. Toluca Lake also boasts the Lakeside Golf Club, an ultraexclusive private course.
As local news outlets have reported on the noise complaints in recent weeks, social media has predictably lit up with variations on “wealthy people whining.” But residents take issue with the caricature of their neighborhood as a gilded realm of the entitled and the well connected.
“This impacts people of all income levels — we have all types of housing,” said Kevin Dees, Rick’s son, who grew up in Toluca Lake and now sells real estate there. “Income level also has nothing to do with whether you deserve to have quiet in your own home.”
To the horror of residents, roller coaster enthusiasts have joined the pile-on, with some vowing to scream even louder.
“No one is against having fun, and no one wants the roller coaster taken away,” Mr. Strong said. “We just want it to be quieter.”
Expansion has long brought Universal into conflict with its neighbors. After residents pushed back against a development plan in the 1990s, the company cut its proposal nearly in half. Later that decade, Universal bought a string of homes along its perimeter and converted them into corporate housing.
Theme parks are generally easier neighbors when they don’t have neighbors. Disney World in Florida has 25,000 acres to itself. Dollywood occupies a wooded valley in eastern Tennessee.
In contrast, Universal Studios Hollywood is squeezed across multiple levels of a hillside in the middle of Los Angeles. It did not start as a theme park. Rather, it grew out of tours that Universal began offering at its movie studio in 1964. Over the decades, Universal mostly added rides that were either indoors or relatively modest in scale.
Hollywood Drift is a dramatic departure — Universal’s most aggressive coaster anywhere and, theme park experts say, the most anticipated new ride of the year.
The challenge is making it peacefully coexist with the neighborhoods around it. Residents have floated ideas ranging from roofs on the coaster cars to sound-muffling helmets. During the Covid-19 pandemic, one Japanese park, concerned about respiratory droplets, asked riders to “please scream inside your heart.”
Universal, as it sometimes does with soon-to-open attractions, has been inviting neighbors to come for a ride. Mr. Garner, 73, accepted. “There’s a point when it’s accelerating up a hill and then it drops, and you feel like you could come out of your seat,” he texted a reporter.
Did he scream?
“Hell, yeah!”
The post Universal’s New Coaster Is a Scream. That’s the Problem. appeared first on New York Times.
