Like I said in the last thread - the name will bother people until about 1 minute after they get off the ride lol
People having annual passes or who already make trips to Universal, are not likely to care as much. But Universal is trying to grow its market, to fill up the (now three) theme parks, it wants new customers. It needs to compete on quality to win those customers. And this approach makes the park seem like a lazy franchise. It furthers some of the worst, latent (even if mostly unfair nowadays) expectations of the Universal parks, going back decades.
Do people think that Disney building two Tiana's Bayou Adventures, or two Star Wars Galaxy's Edges, was genius? Isn't it donning on these companies that bi-coastal clones are not better than distinctive offerings? Even if they ordered this coaster years ago, isn't it better to have a unique name/identity for each coaster at least, since in fact they are not exact replicas anyway?
The Four Season Resort Bora Bora and the Four Season Resort Maui both leverage an "element of continuity" (the Four Seasons brand and all the positive expectations and brand promise that come from it) but also have an important "element of distinction" (the unique name/location) to create clarity and enticement to "collect them all" experience-wise. Killer combo.
Marketing-wise, this winning is free.
My response would be that that thought process requires more "twist yourself into a pretzel to justify it" work than just putting “New York” (or even something non-geographic-specific) in the name.
USF'S NYC section of the park is not themed to actual NYC. It is a movie studios backlot set designed to look like NYC for filming movies, presumably in Hollywood.
Are Diagon Alley and Springfield also movie sets? If so, how do we know this: cameras, lighting rigs, catering trucks and actor's trailers, seeing the backs of sets in those lands? If not, how do we know which areas are movie sets and which aren't, and why are some areas movie sets while others are not?
lf it was so important to have the coasters in both parks have the same name -- and both be inspired by movie-making -- and using any same geographic name was going to cause confusion given one park is actually in Hollywood and both parks have Hollywood areas that are not quite where the coasters are located, and both coasters are on the edge of the theme park and adjacent to backstage-ish areas, why not call them both Fast & Furious: Backlot Drift (as suggested above)? That would avoid confusion and explain away the actual lack of theming around the coasters.
We're not talking about some huge additional expense, here; it's signage and preshow stuff (and, perhaps, very unfortunate concerns about the cost of manufacturing two different shirt designs).
Agreed. They just tell the muralist to paint different words on the brick wall.
As far as the shirt design cost-efficiency...people would collect Hard Rock Cafe cocktail glasses from each location precisely because they had the different names of the locations. That's why they inefficiently printed different glassware. Same for all the tourist tchotchkes at every airport or cruise ship port-of-call. People
want collectibility and specificity.