Resorts World Genting is razing a 35-year-old iron ride park in Malaysia’s Genting Highlands to make way for the world’s first Twentieth Century Fox theme park.
Twentieth Century Fox World will be built on a 25-acre site featuring more than 25 rides and attractions based on famous Fox content including “Alien vs. Predator,” “Ice Age,” “Night at the Museum,” “Rio,” and “Planet of the Apes.”
“We really are in the franchise business at Fox,” says Greg Lombardo, Twentieth -Century Fox’s vice president of global location-based entertainment. “Developing franchises allows us to really, frankly, support a much higher level of capital expenditure on the attractions. These are properties that will be in the public’s eye for a long time to come. We know these characters, and now it’s a chance to bring them to life in very new and exciting ways.”
By the time the new theme park opens, there will be five “Ice Age” movies, three new “Planet of the Apes” (counting the sequels coming out in 2014 and 2016), a second “Rio,” and a third “Night at the Museum.” These movies are not only hugely popular in the United States, but at overseas box offices, as well.
The venue for the park in Malaysia—which Fox sees in some ways as a proof of concept for larger parks elsewhere—is located up a steep drive alongside a thriving casino about an hour from Kuala Lumpur. It was formerly home to an iron ride park built with slightly themed off-the-shelf attractions. The new park designed by Fox and Genting, with an eye to detail and a goal of immersing visitors in blockbuster content, could not be more different.
“We’re going to be able to bring these environments to life in a way that gets us away from that formulaic approach of ‘I’m going to go from attraction to attraction to attraction,’” explains Lombardo, who brings a creative edge to his job after working previously as an independent film producer and serving five years as the head of New York’s National Shakespeare Company.
“This is going to be an opportunity for people to literally go inside of Scrat’s fantasy that we’ve seen in the movies, his pursuit of the acorn … We’re going to really put people—when they enter the Ice Age environment—in that world.”
The desire to make every inch in the park count is also driven by geography—the site extends to the edge of a cliff. But Fox and Genting plan to make it seem bigger than it is by building some of the attractions underground.
“When you’re dealing with a smaller footprint, like we are, we’re going to rely on a highly detailed environment to provide those surprises and moment-by-moment experiences that are going to extend the dwell time in a way that maybe you don’t necessarily have the challenge of if you have a hundred acres to play with,” says Lombardo. “We’re [also] going to go below the deck on some of the rides, so we’ll be basically doubling up on square footage that way. In cases where you have dark attractions, we can go below grade and increase the footprint that way.”
Designing its own branded theme park represents a strategic switch for Twentieth Century Fox, which has previously licensed content to other big players in the industry. Some of the studio’s most famous blockbusters—like “Avatar” (licensed to Disney) and “The Simpsons” (Universal Studios)—will be noticeably absent from Malaysia as a result of past deals. But striking out in a bigger way seems like a no-brainer to Lombardo.
“Why wouldn’t we be doing theme parks?” he asks. “With these kind of properties at our fingertips, why would we simply hand [them] over to others to put within their theme parks? Why not create theme parks around those properties that we can really control and have a say [in]?”
The deal with Genting is still based on a licensing model. Fox provides the intellectual property while Genting invests $300 million to build and operate the park; the difference is Fox now has a dedicated team to place its stamp on the park.
Fox and Genting expect most guests are likely to be Malaysian and Chinese nationals who regularly visit Genting to gamble—significant for Fox, which has ambitions to expand to China. The companies won’t say how many visitors are expected when Twentieth Century Fox World opens in 2016, but they expect it to be much higher than the 2 million who frequented Genting’s old park.
Michael Switow covers the Asia-Pacific region for Funworld.
First Malaysia, Then the World: An Interview with Twentieth Century Fox’s Greg Lombardo
Twentieth Century Fox, one of the world’s best-known and most prolific producers of motion pictures and prime-time television shows, is going to open its first theme park in 2016 in Malaysia. The $300 million Twentieth Century Fox World is set for Resorts World Genting.
Funworld’s Michael Switow talks with Twentieth Century Fox’s point man for the project, Greg Lombardo, vice president for global location-based entertainment—a relatively new hire for Fox but a 23-year veteran of the entertainment industry—about Fox’s partnership with Genting Malaysia and future expansion plans.
Fox could have chosen anyplace in the world to open its first theme park—North America, Europe, Japan … why Malaysia?
It is our first theme park and, for that reason, we needed to get this right and we needed to create, in essence, a real proof of concept. We need to obviously exert as much creative control and influence as we can over the project, but we’re not operating. So, the list of world-class developers with that sort of operational experience and capital credentials to undertake a project like this is a fairly short list.
Most importantly, that first footprint has to be in Asia. It has to be in a place that is going to provide us a really critical gateway to what will be probably our most important audience in the future—and that’s the Chinese.
Genting is best known for its casinos—which it operates in the Bahamas, Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.—though it also opened Universal Studios Singapore three years ago in collaboration with Resorts World Sentosa. Why did Twentieth Century Fox choose Genting Malaysia to be its partner for its first amusement park?
Genting provided us with all those sort of key indicators. We had what was an existing park that had been there since about 1978. Plus, we had a commitment on Genting’s part to basically raze that entire park and start from scratch.
So you have this great combination of a shovel-ready project that has the infrastructure and the footprint in place, but you have all the opportunity of a green field sort of approach. These things came together in a sort of perfect storm, in a good way, to create this unique opportunity for us to establish that first footprint.
You mention a “first footprint.” Is Twentieth Century Fox World in Malaysia going to be the first of many Fox amusement parks?
Absolutely. First and foremost, we have a concept that will work globally. We have a concept that will work very well in China, across Asia, in other emerging markets like Russia, and in areas like Latin America. And, frankly, we have a concept that will work really well in the U.S. So I think for us, everything is in play.
When you look at the sort of collection of [intellectual property] that Fox controls—we have an almost 80-year history that has provided some of the world’s most successful film and television properties and speaks to a very wide demographic—you quickly realize, “Wait a second. We need to be in the theme park destination business.” We are not in a business of one-offing these attractions to other players in this field.
You name a whole bunch of other locations. Where do you think the next park will be after Malaysia?
I don’t want to talk too much about that, but I think it’s safe to say that we’ll be making other announcements. Certainly we look at China as a tremendous long-term opportunity. If you look at the success of some of our films there, they hold numerous box office records and have really been embraced by Chinese audiences.
“Ice Age” is one of the most popular animated films of all time in China. It had a record box office there in its fourth installment and we have recently announced a fifth “Ice Age,” which is actually the first time ever that a fifth animated installment has been made in a franchise anywhere. So, “Ice Age” continues to be an incredible international calling card for us.
Fox also has a very active international film production group that is going into these emerging markets and creating content alongside local partners. [This content] will speak to a theme park audience in a fairly unique way—to be able to offer them both truly global content and also really localized and culturally significant content. |
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