Thursday, September 4, 2008

Daily Spin 9.4.08


IOA Central has another Universal Orlando update for us, and this one has some really cool photos in it. In addition to the regular park update photos, they have pics of a Potterland mock up building at a scenic design company that regularly does work for Universal Orlando. Sorta gives a preview of what the area may look like.


Sea World Orlando has released some media images of the Manta track being constructed, tested, and painted in the fabrication plant in Ohio. This Orlando Sentinel blog has some photos posted. This reveals that the ride's track will be a nice deep blue color, said to have lighter blue supports.


Hard Rock Park's situation seems to be getting worse as more news comes out. An Israeli company that invested $10 million in the theme park has written the investment off as a loss. Investors do this when they're pretty sure they'll never see any of their money back, which in turn means that the park isn't making any money. While this isn't good news for the park, it's also certainly not the end of the road, there's other reasons the investor could have been quick to write off the loss, and plenty of ways for the park to keep operating. We'll see.

Six Flags was proud enough of their results in the 2008 Golden Tickets form Amusement Today magazine that they put out a press release today. Superman Ride of Steel at Six Flags New England was the top steel roller coaster for the third year in a row.


California's Great America has released information on their first ever Halloween Haunt. The special event will have a total of 13 scary attractions in it's debut year, which is pretty amazing. The website for the event is also now live. In Knott's tradition, the park's log flume will also become a haunted attraction during the event.


1 comments:

Chris said...

Parks that take off out of the gate are rare. This was the case with the Magic Kingdom when that opened up back in 1971, however, there are numerous examples of parks that had to slowly build up their client base. IOA, Euro Disneyland/DLP, DCA come to mind, and those also happen to be some of the newest parks. Look at Warner Leroy's downsized Great Adventure / Enchanted Forest as it was in the early 80's compared with the original plan. It was downsized because the customer base was slow to materialize. Compare the park's early performance to the attendance levels the park achieved in the late 90's up to today.

It's going to take more capital before things turn around- right now there is not enough of a resource base built up- they need to add a hotel and an actual Hard Rock Cafe (closest one is on the beach) in order to compete on the resort / destination level. It's certainly possible and I'd argue the hardest step forward has already been taken.

Many coaster site pundits (this site excluded of course) are already dismissing the park and it has not even been a full season yet. It's way too early to say what will happen one way or another, and any investor that is expecting immediate return on investment is foolish.