Universal Studios Hollywood

Where it sits. Universal Studios Hollywood occupies a hilltop and the slope below it at 100 Universal City Plaza, in the unincorporated pocket of Los Angeles County known as Universal City, between the Hollywood Hills and the San Fernando Valley. The site is split by geography into an Upper Lot on the ridge and a Lower Lot reached by the Starway, a chain of long outdoor escalators dropping about 200 feet down the hillside. The working studio — sound stages, production offices and the backlot streets — occupies the ground north and west of the park, and the tram tour is the only public route through it. CityWalk, an open-air street of shops, restaurants and cinemas opened in 1993, sits between the park gates and the parking structures.

The story behind it. Carl Laemmle opened Universal City on 15 March 1915 as a self-contained film factory with its own fire brigade, and from the first day he sold tickets: 25 cents bought a seat on a bleacher to watch silent pictures being made, with a boxed lunch included. Sound killed that arrangement around 1930, because a set that needed silence could not accommodate an audience. The idea returned on 15 July 1964 with a tram tour of the backlot, and the tour gradually acquired staged events until the tour became a theme park with a studio attached rather than the other way round.

The Studio Tour. The tram remains the reason the place is different from every other theme park, because much of what it passes is genuine production infrastructure.

• The Bates Motel and the Psycho house, built in 1959 for Hitchcock's film and moved several times as the hill was reworked, still stand above the road.
• Amity from Jaws has been on the tour since 1976, with a shark that surfaces beside the tram in a purpose-built lagoon.
• Falls Lake holds the wrecked Boeing 747 set built in 2004 for Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds (2005) and left standing afterwards — a full-size fuselage torn apart across a suburban street.
• Colonial Street is the residential backlot that played Wisteria Lane in Desperate Housewives and, decades earlier, held the house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane from The Munsters.
• Courthouse Square is Hill Valley from Back to the Future (1985), clock tower and all. It burned in the backlot fire of 1 June 2008, which also destroyed the New York Street and a vault of master recordings, and was rebuilt.
• Ride segments have been layered onto the route over time, including King Kong 360 3-D, built with Peter Jackson in 2010, and Fast and Furious Supercharged in 2015.

What else is in the park. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter opened on 7 April 2016 with a recreation of Hogsmeade and Hogwarts castle built into the hillside, and Super Nintendo World followed on 17 February 2023 on the Lower Lot's neighbouring terrace, with interactive Mario architecture and a Mario Kart ride. Jurassic World — The Ride, the 2019 rebuild of the 1996 Jurassic Park water ride, drops five and a half stories at its finish. Older attractions have their own history: Earthquake, opened in 1989 and now running as Earthquake — The Big One, was originally a tour segment before it became a standalone show.

How the real place differs from the films. Nearly everything on the tour is a facade or a partial build, and the tour is honest about it — you see the plywood backs of Colonial Street's houses, the shallow depth of the New York brownstones, and the trench in which the Jaws mechanism runs. That transparency is the point of the visit: the tram is a two-hour lesson in how little of what a film shows actually exists. Anyone expecting to walk into standing sets from favourite films will be disappointed; anyone interested in how the illusion is engineered will not be.

Getting there and timing. The Metro B line stops at Universal City/Studio City station, with a free shuttle up the hill every few minutes — a genuinely good option, since the on-site parking structures are large, expensive and slow to empty. Tickets are timed, with front-of-line and VIP options; the VIP tour includes a walking visit to a sound stage and the prop warehouse that the standard ticket does not. Attendance peaks from mid-June to late August and around the Halloween Horror Nights season in September and October, when evening admission is separately ticketed. Weekdays outside school holidays are markedly quieter, gates typically open at 9am, and the Studio Tour is best taken first thing before its queue builds. The park is largely step-free but built on a steep hill, and the Starway escalators have a lift alternative.