Texas's Universal Kids Resort is designed for families with young children – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

Universal Destinations & Experiences announced new details Friday about the theme park being built in Frisco, including the park's official name: Universal Kids Resort.

In January, the company announced it brought a family-oriented theme park and 300-room themed resort hotel to North Texas. On Friday, executives from Universal Destinations & Experiences, a division of Comcast NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC 5, confirmed that they had received approval to move forward with the project and announced the park’s official name.

The theme park is the company's first park specifically designed for families with young children and is suitable for visitors up to 1.27 metres tall.

“The entire resort will have lush landscaping and we have buffer trees,” said Page Thompson, president of new ventures for Universal Destinations & Experiences.

“The people that children in this community grow up with and see, touch and interact with every day are the essence of growing up and living in Frisco,” said Frisco Mayor Jeff Cheney.

The final rendering presented Friday morning differs from the original vision proposed in January 2023 (compare the January and December renderings below).

The footprint is about a quarter of the size of the Orlando parks, scaled down to be “more intimate and appealing” to younger guests. The company said in January that the theme park will have a significantly different look, feel and scale than Universal’s existing parks, but will still have the same quality as its larger resort destinations.

The city estimates that Universal Kids Resort will generate $200 million in annual spending in Frisco.

Molly Murphy, president of Universal Creative, described the park's design as specifically for young children.

“We have playful shows, meet-and-greets, fun food and drinks. We design it with the unbridled creativity of children in mind,” Murphy said. “From a child's perspective. What does it look like, feel like, smell like, taste like? We play to their imagination and their sense of discovery and play.”

Cheney added Friday that the road leading to the park will be called Universal Parkway.

City leaders and Universal executives spoke of their commitment to engaging the community in the process.

“Frankly, this was probably the longest zoning process ever for a project of this size,” Cheney told the crowd.

Residents attended city council and neighborhood council meetings, where they voiced their concerns about the proposed theme park, including its size, increased traffic and potential impact on crime.

“There were concerns about traffic, but when we showed (residents) how the roads would be widened to improve traffic flow, the community was very positive about the project,” Cheney said.

Some residents of the Cobb Hill neighborhood, which is adjacent to the proposed site, were vocal opponents, fearing that housing prices would fall and that homes in their neighborhood would be rented out temporarily to visitors.

The company began construction on the park in November and expects vertical construction to begin in early 2024. Construction workers were seen Friday building a section of cinder block wall along the entrance to Cobb Hill, closing off a section of the neighborhood that had previously been opened. The project is expected to take about two years and will bring about 2,500 construction jobs to the area.