Drive Loop 101 past Cardinals Way in Glendale and the same question comes up every time. Four hotel towers rise out of a 60-acre lot south of State Farm Stadium, roller coaster track has been sitting on the ground for years, and nobody seems to know when any of it opens. Most people who live near it have stopped asking when and started asking whether.
That's the wrong question, or at least an incomplete one. The more useful thing to know right now isn't when VAI Resort opens. It's that the company responsible for one of its two biggest pieces, the Mattel Adventure Park, appears to have quietly stepped away from the project, and nobody announced it. A reporter had to call and ask.
What Changed Between Late 2025 And Right Now
VAI Resort broke ground in 2021 under a different name, Crystal Lagoons, developed by a group called Epic Resort Destinations. The plan included a Mattel-branded amusement park with Hot Wheels coasters, a Barbie Beach House, and a He-Man laser tag arena, aimed at a 2023 opening.
In 2022, Epic ran into money trouble and signed the project over to Tommy and Grant Fisher, a father-son duo of former border wall contractors, who renamed it VAI Resort and kept building toward the Mattel park alongside it. From there, the opening date has moved on a fairly predictable schedule. Late 2023 became late 2024. Late 2024 became "phased opening starting late 2025, with other phases through the first half of 2026," according to VAI's own marketing team in a spring 2025 interview. By September 2025, that language disappeared entirely. VAI told reporters it was "not ready to provide a specific opening date" and would only announce one nine to twelve months before it actually happened.
Glendale's city manager, Kevin Phelps, offered a different number a few weeks later. In an October 2025 interview, he said the resort was tentatively set to open in two phases by the end of 2026, working from an office near Westgate Entertainment District with a direct view of the construction site. That timeline and VAI's own public statement don't match, and by April 2026, local reporters had confirmed what the mismatch suggested. With less than nine months left in the year and no announcement made, the resort was not going to open in 2026 either.
The Developer Who Quietly Disappeared
The more revealing update came in August 2026, when Axios Phoenix looked into the status of the Mattel Adventure Park specifically, timed to National Roller Coaster Day. What they found wasn't a new delay. It was a missing developer.
Epic Resort Destinations, the company that had walked away from the overall resort in 2022 but stayed attached to the Mattel piece, seems to no longer have any role in it. When Axios asked VAI spokesperson Rian Kirkman to confirm Epic's involvement, he sidestepped the question and stated only that "VAI is the owner and operator of the Mattel Adventure Park." Multiple attempts to reach Epic co-founders Mark Cornell and Glen Bilbo went unanswered, and emails to both men bounced back as undeliverable. Mattel itself didn't respond to questions either.
Axios visited the site while reporting the story. There was no evidence of active work at the theme park portion of the property. A VAI spokesperson named Jenn Joseph gave the closest thing to an explanation:
"VAI Resort is in the process of redefining the guest experience and creative vision of the Mattel Adventure Park. We look forward to sharing more in Q4 as the project progresses."
Today is September 28, 2026. Q4 starts in three days.
What The Fence Actually Hides Today
The resort side of the property, separate from the theme park, has visibly more built on it. The plan calls for four towers, named the Amphitheater Tower, Rhythm Tower, Cadence Tower, and VAI Villas, totaling 1,100 rooms. Company officials have said the amphitheater and its adjoining tower represent phase one, alongside a set of restaurants, including a Mediterranean seafood concept from chef José Andrés called Bar Mar, which has been attached to the project's opening announcements for more than a year without a firm date of its own.
What sits behind the fence right now is a mix of finished structural work on the hotel towers and long-idle theme park track. The two halves of the project are being built, or not built, on very different clocks, which is easy to miss if you only glance at the skyline from the freeway and assume the whole thing is one construction timeline running late together.
The Fight That Isn't About The Resort At All
Some of what's slowed VAI down has nothing to do with construction crews. In May 2025, Glendale voters faced two ballot measures tied to the project. Proposition 401 would have rezoned 10 acres near the resort to allow VAI to build office space and a parking garage for employees. Voters rejected it. Proposition 402, which allows VAI to flush water from its pools and other amenities into the city's sewer system, passed. Separately, the state authority that owns State Farm Stadium, along with the Arizona Cardinals, filed suit against the city over parking rights near the resort, a case that was still active as of Phelps's October 2025 comments.
None of that stopped the project's scope from growing. Phelps described watching it expand from a $350 million development with 600 rooms to what he now estimates at close to $1.3 billion and 1,100 rooms. The city projects VAI will generate $32 million a year in revenue once it's operating, which is a large part of why Glendale has kept backing an increasingly complicated, increasingly delayed project rather than walking away from it.
What To Watch For In The Next Few Weeks
If VAI follows through on Jenn Joseph's statement, some clarity on the Mattel Adventure Park's future, including whether Epic Resort Destinations has any remaining role at all, should surface sometime in the next three months. That's a smaller, more specific thing to watch than "when does it open," and it's the piece most likely to actually move before the end of the year.
The resort side has its own tell. VAI has said repeatedly that it will announce a specific opening date nine to twelve months before it happens, and that concert tickets or hotel rooms would go on sale ahead of that date. No such announcement had been made as of this writing, which means even under VAI's own rules, an opening before mid-to-late 2027 is already unlikely.
For now, the honest answer to the question everyone asks driving past Cardinals Way is that part of the project is being built, part of it is sitting still, and the company in charge of the part that's sitting still just admitted it's rethinking who's even in the room.
Glendale changes in pieces like this all the time, one quiet ownership shift or missed deadline at a time. Inspired Real Estate Life keeps an eye on what's actually happening in this neighborhood, not just what's on a rendering, so you hear about it when there's something real to report.
