Greatest theme park rides based on movies

If you can afford the kind of scratch it costs just to visit a Disney park, you can usually find an on-ride video somewhere on YouTube so you can pretend you’ve ridden one of their rides. That’s hard to do with this newer 3D ride based on director James Cameron’s Oscar-winning adventure film because you’ll need both hands to hang onto the handlebars for the whole flight.

Flights of Passage attempts to recreate the feeling of becoming a Na’vi and going for a flight on a mountain banshee in a picture perfect recreation of Pandora. Every inch of this attraction is filled with Disney’s high-caliber recreations of its big film properties. The queue takes guests through the Avatar lab filled with eye popping illusions like the bioluminescent cave walls and the strange creature houses in the PCI Lab. The ride itself is a motion simulator, but it’s unlike any in the world. Guests board their “banshees” on motorbike-style seats that link them with their avatar, and the entire room moves to the action on a huge three-dimensional screen. The action is punctuated with jet streams that shoot air to mimic the feeling of flying and even mists when your banshee skims over a body of water.

The Disney parks are finally starting to add Marvel-themed rides and lands to its theme parks and one of the best sits in Hong Kong Disneyland. This motion-capsule simulator is the first Marvel ride in any Disney park since it bought the franchise and it’s set a very high bar for the attractions that follow it.

Guests enter the Stark Industries headquarters to go on a ride with Tony Stark himself — because nobody wears Iron Man’s suit except Tony Stark. This ride offers the next best thing with a special, autopiloted shuttle craft manned by Stark’s AI assistant Jarvis that takes its riders through a thrilling four-dimensional adventure as Iron Man tries to stop Hydra from stealing one of his newest and biggest reactors. The sounds and sights are the kinds of eye-popping treats that you’ve come to expect from a Marvel/Disney story mixed with Stark’s personal brand of smartass punctuating the action.  

This boat ride is one of the oldest on the list, but a recent makeover has given it new life in a scary way.

The Universal Studios parks first opened the Jurassic Park ride back in the 1990s based on the mega blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg in which a billionaire reanimates dino-DNA for a modern prehistoric zoo. Of course, the dinosaurs “find a way,” as Dr. Ian Malcolm eerily predicts, to escape their confines and wreak havoc on the guests and crew. The ride takes a similar arc, but the newest version follows the lore of the "Jurassic World" films, and just like the first "Jurassic World" movie, the park has bigger and meaner dinosaurs. The ride uses some really slick animatronics to create the Indominus Rex, the trained raptors and the mighty T-Rex that lunge at the boat and each other and ends with a surprise 85-foot drop and a huge splash. You may get wet at the end, but at least you weren’t eaten alive.

If you’re a fan of the Iron Man Experience, then you owe a great deal of gratitude and at least one ride on one of Disney’s oldest continuing attractions.

This Star Wars motion simulator dates all the way back to 1987 in which guests board a special spacecraft headed for the Ewok forest moon of Endor that’s piloted by a robot with a few screws loose who ends up getting everyone in the middle of an Imperial battle. Two decades later, Disney expanded and rebooted the ride with a series of new adventures featuring new characters including Darth Vader, who throws the ship around with his Force hold, a projection of Jedi Master Yoda and an animatronic C-3PO. The film segments are mixed and matched with each new ride so the experience is different every time you ride, and Disney is expanding Star Tours with even more scenes and scenarios starting next year.

Most roller coasters that just name themselves after movie franchises are just roller coasters. This steel coaster in Surrey, England is based on the bloody horror franchise and actually works the thrills of a Saw movie into the action on the track.

This Saw ride starts as a dark ride and finishes as a white-knuckle thrill coaster with dips and inversions that still play with Jigsaw’s trademark traps. The first portion takes guests through some of Jigsaw’s death traps like swinging pendulums and a jarring appearance by the squeaky voiced Billy the Puppet. Then just before the ride launches guests into a top-speed coaster ride, one of Jigsaw’s victims sprays “blood” on the guests (It’s just warm water) as the train launches into the first of three inversions. The climax comes when the train narrowly avoids a set of giant rotating saw blades by dropping down a jarring 100 degree drop.

The original Pirates of the Caribbean rides at Disneyland and Walt Disney World are iconic, but Shanghai Disneyland topped both of them with its new take on the boat ride based on the movies they inspired.

The expanded version of the classic boat ride is similar to its predecessors, but it uses some impressive technology to bring the special effects from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies to life right before your eyes. One of the most impressive effects starts right at the beginning when you see a skeleton steering a sunken vessel magically transform into a lifelike recreation of Capt. Jack Sparrow... and things only get bigger and bolder from there. Huge movie screens simulate the experience of ghost ships rising off the bottom of the ocean. Guests come face to face with a scary accurate animatronic Davy Jones — complete with his wriggling tentacle beard — and find themselves in the middle of a life-size ship battle just before Sparrow and Jones square off for one last explosive battle.

This is one of the industry’s most impressive 3D dark rides and that’s a huge accomplishment considering how sick we are of the never-ending onslaught of Transformers sequels.

This Universal Studios ride originally started as a 3D Spider-Man experience before Disney got its mitts on all the Marvel franchises. However, the Transformers makeover breathed new life into the ride and it’s one of the park’s signature attractions. Guests board trackless ride vehicles and go on a thrilling, high flying adventure as Optimus Prime and the Autobots battle Megatron and the Decepticons for control of the almighty all-Spark. The vehicles move to different 3D movie screens and the cars bump and swerve to the impressively animated action that plays out on each screen. There’s also some cool fire and smoke effects in between each scene that’s got some of the most detailed designs for any ride of its kind.

Few rides do as good of a job paying tribute to its film inspirations as this innovative dark ride in Disneyland’s Adventureland. The Indiana Jones Adventure takes guests through experiences that simulate some iconic staples of Indiana Jones movies and they still manage to get a scare or two out of us after almost 30 years in operation.

Once again, Indiana Jones is on a mission to retrieve a rare and powerful artifact from a temple filled with booby traps and creepy, crawling creatures. The most impressive part of the ride is the vehicles themselves. The Jeeps look like they came straight out of an Indiana Jones movie and even though they move on a track, the chassis can lift, swerve and spin independently from the wheels so it feels like you’re riding over rough terrain or the car is skidding even if it’s moving on a straight line. The harrowing adventure takes guests through some impressive special effects like a room that shoots “poison darts” as you race through the hail of fire and swarms of bugs feel like they are crawling into your car. Disney recently did an upgrade that fixes some of the ride’s busted contraptions and adds some new lighting effects. And yes, there’s snakes. There has to be snakes.

This unique coaster doesn’t have all the usual twists and turns. In fact, it’s just one straight track but one of end of it goes up to over 400 feet in the sky and there’s only one way back down it.

Riders enter the glowing world of Superman’s home planet and pile into cars on a track that will launch them to a record-breaking speed of 100 mph in just seven seconds. The end of the track goes up to 41 stories high and the speed and height produces few seconds or pure weightlessness as gravity grabs the car and pulls it back down the track at a blistering backwards speed. This ride recreates the feeling of being Superman without having to save the world every other day or enduring the body-numbing effect of kryptonite.

Motion simulators are cool, but they don’t always feel like you’re entering an actual space shuttle or high-flying superhero transporter. This motion simulator in Disney’s new Star Wars: Galaxy Edge experience is the complete opposite of those attractions.

Smuggler’s Run recreates the experience of walking into, piloting and crash-landing the famous Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars universe. The queue line and path you take to the cockpit recreate one of cinema’s most famous starships down to the tiniest loose wire that always shorts out the hyperdrive at the worst possible time. The whole thing is actually more like one giant, immersive flight simulator/game as you and five other guests pilot the ship by taking on unique roles such as a pilot, gunner or engineer, and the buttons and controls actually affect the action of the ride. It may have one of the park’s longest lines but the wait pays off because you actually get to the fly the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

This 3D adventure may be an expansion of the 3D experience on the Universal Studios tour in Hollywood, but the additions make King Kong 3D look like a baby howler monkey.

The story of this thrilling King Kong adventure experience starts from the minute you step into the waiting line. The queue takes you through the winding passages of Skull Island as you encounter angry worshippers who hide behind rocks and even jump out to grab you when you’re not expecting it. Then you board tour buses that take you into the mighty Kong’s lair when your crew is attacked by prehistoric creatures that lunge at you and your fellow passengers. Then you come to face to face with the giant gorilla himself as he battles a group of flesh-hungry dinosaurs in a 3D motion ride before you are greeted by a giant animatronic Kong that roars to life as you return to the real world.

This experience is basically a re-skin of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror that re-invented the drop ride experience, but the new theme and story are just as thrilling and entertaining as you’d expect from a Disney thrill ride.

The tower has been turned into the giant warehouse of the infamous Taneleer Tivan (also known as The Collector) who has finally captured the Guardians of the Galaxy and put them on a semi-permanent display. All of the movie franchise’s stars reprise their film roles, including the voice of Bradley Cooper as the wily Rocket Racoon, who escapes from his enclosure and rigs the Collector’s elevator to help his friends escape. Each ride is randomized as Rocket takes over the elevator and hooks up the Walkman to the ride’s PA system to play one of six songs like Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” or Parliament’s “Give Up the Funk.” The elevator shoots to the top of the tower, where Rocket detonates an EMP that opens all of the Collector’s cages and sends the elevator on a random series of rises and drops along with a rotating series of scenes of the Guardians’ fight with some of the Collector’s fiercer artifacts. The Twilight Zone version of Disney’s drop ride was amazing, but this Marvel update is just as impressive and can still drag a scream out of anyone with the steeliest of nerves.  

The addition of a Harry Potter land to Universal Studios’ theme park in Orlando is one of the most impressive lands you’ll see in any park. Sometimes it looks like they’ve rebuilt Diagon Alley and the Gringotts Wizarding Bank brick-for-brick from the big screen. One of its newer riders has quickly become one of the park’s signature attractions.

This motorbike coaster send guests on a high-flying adventure on Hagrid’s two-seater motorcycle in one of the most detailed roller coasters in the world. Guests can sit in the driver’s seat or the sidecar as a train of motorcycles whips them around animatronic recreations of the Harry Potter universe’s fiercest and fanciful creatures. One of its most impressive features happens after you “accidentally” end up in the Forbidden Forest and the track literally drops you down to another track in the dark that launches you out of the forest at 50 mph. It’s not just an amazing ride but also a beautiful shrine to one of the franchise’s most beloved characters.

TRON has been begging for a ride adaptation since the first film showed just what Disney could do with a computer. It’s taken more than a few decades to get one, but it’s more than made up for the time.

This new motorcycle coaster that first launched in Disney’s theme park in China and most recently at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida perfectly recreates the neon tech-dystopia of the TRON universe without having to scramble and reanimate guests’ molecular structure. The ride puts guests on a train of the computer universe’s famed lightcycle just in time for a battle with a rival program. The ride launches the train outside over the heads of other passing guests before entering the playfield as it ducks and dodges the rival lightcycler. The coaster has projection screens that strategically run footage of the lightcycle duel at just the right time so it feels like you’re actually fighting for the users.

This new, movie-themed coaster is one of the purest coaster rides in the bunch, but the ride is so immersive and thrilling that you’re too busy screaming and catching your breath to notice.

The new Jurassic World ride is themed as a Jurassic World attraction designed to pit guests in a race against a trained pack of velociraptors. Guests can see some of the raptors up close in their enclosure that can breathe hot air from their muzzled snouts and wriggle in place in the queue line. The coaster is a twisting, turning thrill ride that can go as fast as 70 mph and send guests screaming down a maximum drop of 140 feet as the raptors “race” past the cart during some of its more harrowing moments.