A little over six months ago, we published a mammoth article dispelling the overwhelming majority of the fog of uncertainty that, at the time, loomed over Kings Dominion’s plans for the former site of the legendary Volcano: The Blast Coaster. In that Christmas Eve 2023 piece, we predicted the addition of a large, launched, Bolliger & Mabillard-made Wing coaster set to sprawl all the way from Flight of Fear to the plaza in front of Tumbili. We assessed that this new roller coaster was set to open in 2025; would feature a sloped, uphill launch and multiple inversions; and would utilize the remaining entry and queue infrastructure from Volcano paired with a new, ground-up queue and station area closer to Flight of Fear. Contained within that original piece was also a “best guess” estimation of the coaster’s layout and elements featuring a mock-up by friend of the site and brilliant NoLimits creator, ML Designs.
Though that initial 2023 article is not required reading ahead of the story below, I would encourage you to read back through it first if you’d like either a more comprehensive overview of the history of the site in question or a significantly more detailed explanation of our analytical process. Today’s piece will provide an overview of everything that has happened with Kings Dominion’s 2025 coaster since the winter, followed by our latest “best guess” forecast regarding the design of the final attraction. We’ll then round things out with a look ahead at what else Kings Dominion may have up their sleeves in the months and years ahead.
What’s Been Happenin’
Kings Dominion’s 2024 opening day on March 22nd gave us our first, good, in-person look at the site of the park’s next coaster since Fall 2023. Even back in March, construction walls were already up, “Excavation Dig Site” teasers were in place, and ground had already long since been broken for this major new attraction.
By mid-April, less than a month after the park’s opening day, a huge area of the Kings Dominion parking lot was cordoned off with a chain link fence to facilitate deliveries and staging.
Then, by the end of May, we finally saw our first pieces of coaster hardware arrive on-site at Kings Dominion. Included in this delivery were a small stub of emerald green maintenance area track and miscellaneous lava gray colored bits and bobs.
Subsequent track and support deliveries reaffirmed the initial assumption that this green and gray color scheme was the final look for the entire coaster layout.
Meanwhile, inside the park on the new coaster’s future site, crews were hard at work throughout the spring grading land, installing infrastructure, digging and pouring footers, etc. Incredibly, Kings Dominion was able to get almost all of the extensive prep work required in and around Jungle X-Pedition’s existing path network completed before the park moved to daily operations for the summer. This allowed the park to provide guests access to all of the attractions surrounding the new coaster’s site (namely Tumbili, Reptilian, and Arachnidia) whenever the park was operating. As shown in the panorama below, you can see wooden boxes covering completed 2025 coaster footers scattered all around Jungle X.
Also visible are a number of new teasers mounted to the on-site construction walls. These new teasers included a 2025 debut year confirmation, a propelling compelling hint about a possible launch, and numerus glyphs that, to most viewers, seemed to resemble some sort of avian creature.
Early June also brought with it some bad news, though. As reflected in updated project site plans filed by Kings Dominion with Hanover County, the large building which was previously planned to enclose the wing coaster’s launch had been struck—replaced instead by what appears to be a series of thematic pillar-like structures over the start of the launch track. Depictions of this area in both the original (left) and latest (right) site plan filings can be found below.
While the removal of the launch building was an unfortunate development, it is still quite nice to see scenic structures surrounding the newly-exposed launch section. While this likely nukes the previously-speculated potential for some sort of elaborate pre-launch show sequence (à la Copperhead Strike), the pillar-like additions should still contribute nicely to riders’ sense of speed, while accelerating down the coaster’s launch track.
By mid-June back at the Project Calera site, the first emerald green coaster track began to rise! Track install began with the final brake run, maintenance, and station areas of the attraction, and by the end of the month that entire section of the coaster had been erected.
Come early July, KDFans was able to leak the official, internal codename for Kings Dominion’s 2025 attraction, “Project Caldera,” a superb reference to the coaster’s predecessor, Volcano.
By mid-July, following the installation of the brake, maintenance, and station area track, crews had moved on to the coaster’s massive, sloped launch segment.
Meanwhile, throughout July, while track was arriving in the parking lot and coaster erection was proceeding with haste inside the gates, Kings Dominion finally began teasing their 2025 project on social media. The marketing campaign began with a series of Instagram photos building up to the release of a teaser image, video, and associated webpage which confirmed a July 31st announcement date.
Over the past handful of days, track and support erection has taken an even more exciting turn. Crews are currently focused installing some of the coaster’s largest aerial maneuvers. A few days ago, the entry and exit to the 2025 attraction’s enormous dive loop were installed.
Then, just hours before the publication of this article, the exit of the post-launch overbank-esque element—the element which will ultimately reach the coaster’s highest point—has begun to be installed. The following photographs of this incredibly gorgeous looking element were originally provided by ParkFans forum member guy305, here.
What We’re Expectin’
So, with the announcement date just over a week away, what are we expecting? By and large, our forecast remains much the same as it was back in December of last year—we still anticipate the announcement of a large, launched, Bolliger & Mabillard-made Wing coaster that will sprawl all the way from Flight of Fear to the plaza in front of Tumbili. We now know this coaster is set to open in 2025 and that it features a sloped, uphill launch. We still assess that it will contain multiple inversions and utilize the remaining entry and queue infrastructure from Volcano, paired with a new, ground-up queue and station area closer to Flight of Fear.
That said, there are details within our forecast that have changed. As previously mentioned, updated site plans filed by the park removed the launch tunnel building that we wrote about extensively in our original KD 2025 article. With the launch track erected, it became clearly evident that the small hill at the end of the first launch in our original “Best Guess” mockup wasn’t coming to fruition. Though we made clear back in December that the colors in our mockup weren’t final, thanks to all of the ride hardware that’s now on-site, we can obviously say that Project Caldera features green track and gray supports, not the placeholder orange and gray displayed in earlier drafts.
These onsite observations extend far beyond just track color and installed coaster segments though. Two ParkFans forum members, Haunted River (@BrianSterowski on Twitter) and CoasterMac (ML Designs on YouTube) have undertaken an incredible ride hardware documentation and analysis effort. Thanks to Haunted River’s photos and ML Designs’ track tracking, two areas of the coaster’s layout where we expressed a lot of uncertainty back in December have begun to come into a bit clearer focus.
Below is a graphic I put together utilizing ML Design’s Project Caldera NoLimits mockup. It represents our current forecast for the layout of Kings Dominion’s 2025 B&M wing coaster.
The biggest changes you may notice from our December forecast are likely the first element following the launch and the element following the dive loop. Everything else, layout-wise, is essentially unchanged.
So, firstly, that post-launch element. We simply called it the “Highest Point” in our Christmas Eve article and speculated that it could be an overbanked turn or, potentially, something a little more inverted like a massive cutback. The “Best Guess” NoLimits mockup that ML Designs crafted for us in December leaned more towards this being an inverted element. That said, given the track that has shown up onsite thus far, ML Designs now believes it’s more likely that this element does not invert and is, instead, a bit more like a wall stall. ML Designs/CoasterMac explains his position a bit more in-depth, here.
As for the element following the dive loop, back in the winter we were pretty sure this would going to end up being a large corkscrew. We did, however, note in our analysis that it wasn’t “impossible that it could be a non-inverting element with similar 2D shaping—likely an S-hill.” Well, much like with the previously addressed element, based on the track pieces that have been identified onsite, we now believe that it is more likely that this element will not invert and will, in fact, be an S-hill.
I want to emphasize that our confidence level in these two areas of uncertainty continues to be notably lower than our estimation of the rest of the coaster’s layout—hence the decision to include multiple options in our “Best Guess” layout graphic above. It will be very interesting to see the exact shaping of these portions of the coaster either when the attraction is announced on July 31st or when these segments are actually erected onsite. Given the current pace of construction, it’s hard to know which will come first!
Odds & Ends
While it may seem as if we know most everything there is to know about this new coaster, in truth there’s still a lot to learn. Height, speed, final shaping (especially of elements one and three post-launch), name, lore, and theme are all pretty much opaque to us at this point. That’s not all though. While it seems to be a given that we should expect Kings Dominion to announce their 2025 coaster next Wednesday, there are numerous other changes and additions that Kings Dominion could surprise us with as well.
The most obvious potential addon announcement would be information regarding Kings Dominion’s plans for their iconic Intamin giga coaster, formerly Intimidator 305, which currently bears the (likely placeholder) name, “Project: 305.” Leaks and rumors have pointed to a retheme and full repaint—potentially involving some combination of the colors yellow, orange, red, and/or black. Hints on the Project: 305 sign point pretty overtly to some sort of leopard/panther/big cat-related Jungle X-Pedition theme for the coaster. That said, it’s impossible to completely rule out the idea that this could be an elaborate thematic misdirection.
If Project: 305 is slated to become part of Jungle X-Pedition in 2025, what does that mean for the likes of Flight of Fear? Flight of Fear physically separates Project: 305 from the rest of Jungle X-Pedition. Walking from Jungle X into a secret government facility, and then back into a different section of Jungle X sounds mighty messy. Surely if Project: 305 is slated for Jungle X integration in ’25, Flight of Fear will need thematic work too, right?
Continuing with that same train of thought, what about Chicken Shack? Like Flight of Fear, it’s on the path between the current Jungle X area and Project: 305. Chicken Shack doesn’t really have any theme at the moment and it serves painfully generic (but regretfully not unpopular) cuisine. Given the park’s nearly-yearly dedication lately to overhauling park restaurants, could Chicken Shack be on the menu for 2025 work?
Oh, and then, what about Backlot Stunt Coaster? If every other element that used to make up Safari Village is finally slated to be assimilated into the single, cohesive Jungle X-Pedition theme come 2025, there have to be plans for Backlot too, right? It would stand out like a sore thumb in this widely-theorized mega-sized Jungle X expansion.
Going even further afield, next year is Kings Dominion’s 50th anniversary and we expect the park to celebrate it in a pretty major way (see: recent anniversary celebrations at Worlds of Fun & Kings Island). That announcement should land at some point ahead of the 2025 season as well.
At some point, the question becomes one of money. There are so many projects that seem to be either in-progress or logically inevitable that it’s hard to fathom Kings Dominion actually being able to tackle them all imminently. Given the array of potential wildcards KD may have stashed in their back pocket though, the next six to nine months could be incredibly interesting for Doswell, VA.
If you’d like to stay up to date on the goings-on a Kings Dominion, give KDFans a follow on Twitter and/or Facebook. If you’re super interested in following in-depth coverage of Kings Dominon’s 2025 B&M wing coaster in particular, follow along with the dedicated thread for the project on the ParkFans forum. Between over FIFTY on-site updates from Haunted River and consistent layout analysis from CoasterMac/ML Designs, there has been a ton of interesting content and info appearing over there!
Anyway, thanks for readin’ and consider passing this article along to other KD fans you may know!