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This is a great point and something I think people tend to forget. There is zero chance Universal would be still putting on this MASSIVE event if it was not making them a MASSIVE amount of money in return. You need to think not only about the houses, but the day to day running of the event. You have an army of actors. Those actors have to be cast and go through all the paper work which costs time and money. Those actors then need to be trained, which again, more money. Then they need to go through makeup and costuming nightly. Besides the actors, you have event staff that is also hired to man the lines and houses. You have a big construction crew building the houses. Various artist painting and doing other art related work. You have prop guys building big props. You have large group of people designing costumes months in advance. You have to pay for police and their own added security. You need to hire a ton of new bartenders and food staff to work all the tents. You have to design, build, choreograph and put on a major show production requiring at least 50 people (actors, techs, ushers, etc) for B&T. Not to mention daily maintenance. AWIL required hours of work DAILY to keep the puppets working correctly. The other houses are always having work done in them to fix things that get broken after thousands of people walk through nightly. This is a massive undertaking that literally never stops. All the departments at the resort have something to do with the event. The moment a year ends, the next year starts. Just for fun, lets say a house has 30 actors in one cast on average (megahouses have a lot more, some have around 20). Each house has two casts, so that's 60 people. Lets say they work 8 hour shifts and get paid $10.00 an hour (NO idea what scareactors are paid but I can't imagine it being lower than $10). To just pay the scareactors, your looking at close to $5,000 a night for ONE house. To pay for each of the nine houses, your close to $45,000 a night JUST FOR HOUSE ACTORS! Add in another 100+ actors for two casts of people in the streets and that's close to another $10,000. Then lets add another $5,000 a night for B&T cast and your at $60,000 A NIGHT JUST FOR ACTORS! If the event runs 30 nights, your actor budget alone is $1.8 MILLION DOLLARS! That just for actors! Then you have all the stuff I listed above to take into account as well. Sure, the event brings in a ton of money as well but it's crazy to really break it down. This isn't something that is quickly tossed together. 10's of millions of dollars go into this event each year between wages, paying for IP's, marketing, etc. They can't afford to create a big event and NOT have IP's to get people to come. If they did a non-IP year, people might still come but not enjoy it as much and so the following year they will lose out on a ton of customers.

Did the P&T house get good reviews(for a 3D house)? I don't recall it being that great. All I remember were the GATs you could press to scare the other people in line. I wouldn't mind another best of house just as long it features older content than the one from last year.