Upcoming Roller Coasters That Will Blow You Away In 2020 And Beyond

With their film franchise and their tendency to spoil Marvel movies with their toy sets, Lego bricks have never been more trendy than they are today. Still, the only way they can physically move you has traditionally been that little, hopping dance of pain when you step on one ... at least, until Legoland New York rolls out its brand new Dragon roller coaster. According to USA Today, the fantasy-themed coaster will make its grand debut in the spring of 2020, along with the rest of the theme park, which will open in Goshen, New York, as the ninth and largest Legoland in the world.

Apart from the fact that the Dragon is located in the park's medieval-themed Knights' Kingdom area, details of the ride are rather scarce at the moment. However, if the dragon-themed coasters in smaller Legolands such as Billund Resort and Florida are anything to go by, the Dragon is likely a combined indoor/outdoor track that will start as a moderately paced tour inside a Lego castle filled with fantastic sights, knights, wizards, and dragons. After the calm indoor part, the train exits the castle and the ride suddenly speeds up into a more traditional roller coaster ride.

As anyone who has read Brothers Grimm can attest, fairy tales are no laughing matter. So when Attractions Magazine reported in 2018 that a Dutch fairy tale theme park called Efteling planned to build a $17.3 million roller coaster based on a famous German poem about two mean and naughty boys named Max and Moritz, most people aren't expecting the ride to be particularly gentle. While details of the ride are scarce, it will likely be family-friendly and retain the Swiss theme of its predecessor.

The Max & Moritz roller coaster is scheduled to open in 2020 in place of the park's old bobsleigh run attraction, and the park has enough faith in the project that it decided to postpone plans to expand and develop another area to focus on this. Still, even without hard technical specs, confidence is high that Max & Moritz will be a great addition to the world of roller coasters: Official artwork shows the coaster snaking through buildings, around forest trees, and even above a small lake.

In 2018, Pennsylvania's Hersheypark announced it's building an entirely new area called Hershey's Chocolatetown. According to Coaster 101, the $150 million project is set to open in 2020, and its centerpiece will be a brand new, currently unnamed roller coaster. The park says the ride will be the park's largest and fastest, which is not bad considering Hersheypark is already home to a few fairly impressive coasters. Their Storm Runner and Skyrush both reach an impressive 75 mph, and the latter coaster is a very respectable 200 feet tall and 3,600 feet long.

This would put the 2020 coaster easily in the realm of hypercoasters, which are 200 to 299 feet tall. Apart from that and the fact that the park has said the new ride will be both longer and faster than Skyrush, precious little information has trickled out. However, there's a good chance we might know this massive new coaster's name. According to Amusement Insider, in May 2019 the park trademarked the name "Candymonium", which ... is a pretty great moniker for a giant, chocolate-themed roller coaster, really.

There are few roller coaster projects out there more mysterious than whatever's going on at Lagoon, Utah. They're definitely building something, and said something looks an awful lot like a large roller coaster, but details of the project are few and far between. As Fox 13 in Salt Lake City notes, the park has decided to keep the specifics of the ride a closely guarded secret, so what's known about the project comes largely in the form of guesses and rumors on Reddit and assorted amusement park enthusiast forums that pay a surprising amount of attention to these things.

Current guesstimates indicate the ride's name might be Primordial (possibly with a prehistoric theme?), it might be a dark ride/roller coaster hybrid, it might open in 2020, and its construction area is more than twice the space of the park's current largest coaster, a mega-coaster called Cannibal. Seeing as Cannibal is already a pretty impressive ride that features water elements, a massive beyond-vertical free-fall drop into an underground tunnel and a 140-foot-tall inverted loop, this bodes fairly well for Primordial, particularly as the construction seems to include some preparation for underground elements.

Disney makes some of today's biggest movies and operates some of the most famous theme parks in the world, so it's not exactly a surprise that the two occasionally intertwine. According to Entertainment Weekly, one of their hottest movie franchises will take roller coaster form in 2021, when Disney World's Epcot will gain a Guardians of the Galaxy coaster. The indoor coaster is expected to be something of a trail blazer, with a ride system and vehicles that are nothing like the park's guests have ever seen.

Bob Chapek, chairman of Disney parks, experiences and consumer products, says the goal is to immerse the riders in the story of the ride as it unfolds, and instead of pointing straight ahead, each individual car will be programmed to spin and revolve toward the relevant parts of the story as it proceeds. Oh, and this thing will be pretty big. In 2018, its foundations required 960 trucks' worth of concrete, and the building that will house it is so massive that "the volume of four Spaceship Earth attractions" could fit inside it. Disney really likes the Guardians of the Galaxy, is what we're saying.

Unsurprisingly, the ride will be located in the park's Future World.

Belgium's Walibi amusement park has an ambitious three-year plan to put out a brand new roller coaster every year, and the project Amusement Insider seems most excited about is their unnamed 2021 ride. The Intamin-built megacoaster will be the highest one in the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg) and France and is set to feature 15 "negative gravity" airtime moments. The coaster's currently estimated height will be 164 feet, it will feature at least one steep 80-degree drop, and as you can see from the POV ride video by Amusement Insider, it will have just about every twist and turn imaginable. Enthusiasts rattle off terms like S-curves, Stengel dives, bunny hops, double-downs and non-inverting cobra rolls, all of which amount to one thing: Two minutes or so of a roaring, rollicking good time.

Of course, it must be noted that the current layout of the coaster is of the "not 100% confirmed by the park" variety, so a few twists and turns may be subject to change. Still, it's hard to imagine them suddenly scratching the plans and opting for bumper cars instead.

A gigacoaster is a very specific type of roller coaster that focuses on altitude instead of speed. A coaster can only join the Giga Club if it has a drop of at least 300 feet, and Coaster Critic tells us there are only a handful of operational ones in the world. That makes the construction of a new one a major deal among enthusiasts, so people pricked up their ears when it was reported in May 2019 that the Kings Island amusement park in Mason, Ohio, was working on a mysterious new ride that seems an awful lot like a gigacoaster. Experts say the blueprints for this "Project X" are absolutely those of a coaster with an estimated 305-foot drop. The local paper Journal-News reports that the coaster's name could be either Orion or Polaris based on trademark applications by the park owners, and coaster forums have been awash with speculation about the upcoming ride. Fans have even created visualizations of the ride, like the one above, based on the blueprints. (Coaster fans are dedicated people.)

So when is the ride coming? And how cool will it be? Cincinnati's WCPO notes that park officials are playing their cards pretty close to the chest, but seeing as the company that owns Kings Island also owns four of the six active gigacoasters in the world, it's pretty safe to say this one won't be a merry-go-round.