Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood Review
I started talking about my family’s trip to Los Angeles to take a Mexican Riviera cruise with Norwegian Cruise Line with a short review of the La Quinta Inn && Suites by Wyndham LAX but today I wanted to talk about how we spent our extra day in Los Angeles before our cruise.
We have done the Disneyland and Universal Studios theme parks in the past and on this trip it did not seem like that was a really good option for us. Trips to the theme parks would have been extremely expensive (over $1000 for a day at Disneyland) and we really just wanted more of a relaxed day instead of a jam packed theme park. That left us looking for a half day activity that we could all agree on. Not a simple task to find for most families. After some searching we stumbled upon the Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood. Tickets were resonable (well, not over a $1000.00 for half a day) and it was a tour we could all agree on.
The Good
I already mentioned the price and it seems reasonable when you compare it to a theme park. Tickets were $99.00(CAD) on Expedia and I prebought 4 vouchers before leaving.
The beginning and end of the tour is self guided so you can take as much time as you like. The beginning part of the tour is mostly about the history of Warner Bros. and the end of the tour is mostly the DC Universe props. If looking and reading displays are not really your thing you can just go through these sections quickly.
It was interesting to ride around the backlot and see many of the locations that tv shows and movies are actually filmed. Just like seeing the Back to the Future town square at Universal there are many iconic spots on the Warner Bros. lot that we recognized and it was interesting to see. Of course if you are a fan of Friends you will see many of the spots where they shot the show, including a whole section just dedicated to Friends.
The Not So Good
Our tickets had a time printed on them. This made it sound like if we were late we would miss our tour. This is NOT the case and is just confusing. It is just a way for them to control how many tickets and guests to expect. Honestly the whole time thing on the tickets just added stress to our trip since Los Angeles traffic made us late and we were worried about missing the tour. Once we got there we realized the time is just a suggestion.
There is little to no signage saying where you start the tour. I felt bad for the security guy that ended up directing people where to go to start the tour. How hard would it be to have a sign that says people with tickets enter the tour here. Maybe not so wordy but really it just would save the security person a ton of questions.
Many of the displays feature The Batgirl movie. A movie that Warner Bros. made but never released, but there are whole sections featuring how they made it in the tour. It is just ridiculous that they feature a movie they never released. Granted we got a good laugh about it, but really Warner Bros. remove the Batgirl movie stuff. It just highlights how bad the movie industry is when you make a movie, never release it and then create a whole bunch of displays to say how great it was.
Overall
We felt like we got our moneys worth from the tour. My youngest is a huge Friends fan so they really enjoyed all of the Friends displays and seeing the fountain etc. My oldest enjoys super hero movies so the DC Universe displays were interesting to see. The whole Batgirl movie stuff while not being great actaully did give us all a pretty good laugh at Warner Bros. expense. If you have half a day in Los Angeles I would recommend taking the Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood. We did the tour on a Saturday so it would be interesting to do it on a weekday when there might be a chance of seeing something being filmed.
Overall it was an enjoyable half day excursion.