Guardians of the Galaxy -- Mission: BREAKOUT!

Image: DisneyI didn’t have a difficult time deciding the best overall Marvel ride. One’s stood above the rest since it opened, and it’ll likely hold that title for another couple of years. The debate did lead to an odd epiphany, though. This list is ultimately about which park claims supremacy in the realm of Marvel theme park attractions.

THE best ride is undeniably at Universal Studios. In totality, the two Disney-Marvel attractions are significantly better than the four Universal-Marvel ones. The weak rides pull down the overall average at Universal, while the two Disney rides are both thoroughly entertaining.

Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT! famously replaced Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney California Adventure. It immediately became the first Disney-Marvel ride in North America at the same time. Regarding theming, I've already hinted at my adoration for The Collector's trinkets, displayed throughout the line queue. 

Image: DisneyThe ride itself is like a shaky cam movie. You see a story on the screen, the digital display projected on the wall in front of you. Since you’re bouncing up and down in an elevator shaft, however, you’ll feel out of control throughout the ride experience. Imagineers have done an incredible job in keeping guests off-balance through Mission: BREAKOUT!. You’ll never know if you’re about to go up or down, and you’ll forget to think about it due to the immersive nature of this sort of storytelling. It’s a brilliant re-imagining of the drop tower dark ride. It’s just not…

The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man

Image: UniversalPeople in the business of theme park analysis selected this attraction as the best dark ride in the world. They voted this way for 12 straight years. That would be like a baseball player leading the league in homers for a dozen years in a row. It's theoretically impossible, yet it happened.

The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man is the most acclaimed dark ride in the history of dark rides. And that’s important since Disney invented dark rides all the way back in 1955. They had a 44-year head start on Universal, yet the Webslinger’s attraction is the best one ever.

The genius of the Spider-Man attraction is the way that it thrusts the rider into the action. You’re an intrepid cub reporter tasked with getting a huge story for the Daily Bugle. What you really get is to see just how tough Spidey has it on a nightly basis. He battles several supervillains, but all the while, the Webslinger’s getting distracted by you, as you keep getting placed in jeopardy by all the overpowered baddies.

Image: UniversalThe Spider-man motion simulator is a 20-year-old attraction that still satisfies so much to this day that its ride design has become the blueprint for much of what Universal's built since then. Even now, it's the best Marvel attraction ever made even though Disney has elevated the level of competition in recent years.