What Paramount’s Purchase Of Warner Bros. Means For Theme Parks

Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. is big news for the theme park industry. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Getty Images

When a federal judge cleared the way for Paramount’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery earlier this week, it brought the curtain down on one of the biggest takeover battles in Hollywood history. It also created a new theme park titan.

Naturally, the vast majority of the coverage of the blockbuster deal has focused on theatrical releases and has therefore largely overlooked the fact that both studios are sleeping giants of the theme park industry.

They don’t just own the rights to many of the most beloved entertainment franchises but a lot of them have yet to be translated into mainstream theme park rides. They include Paramount’s Top Gun, Star Trek and Mission: Impossible as well as Lord of the Rings, Gremlins and Game of Thrones from Warner Bros. Individually, each studio struggled to grow a wide theme park footprint but together they could comfortably challenge Universal and even Disney.

Out of the two studios, Warner is the bigger player in the theme park landscape though it is still a relative newcomer. It first licensed its characters, including the stars of its Looney Tunes cartoons, to American amusement park chain Six Flags in 1984 beginning a partnership which is still in place to this day.

By 1991 dark clouds had gathered over Six Flags so Warner Bros.’ parent company, Time Warner, bought a 50% stake in the business to rescue it from financial difficulty.

Over the following two years Time Warner completed a full buyout for $70 million making it the sole owner of Six Flags. Investment firm Boston Ventures bought a 51% stake in 1995 and three years later Time Warner sold its remaining shares to Premier Parks, the predecessor of Six Flags’ current New York Stock Exchange-listed parent company.

The deal included exclusive, long-term licensing rights for Six Flags to use Warner Bros. and DC characters in its parks and they can still be found there today. However, Warner retained the right to launch its own parks and its first – Warner Bros. Movie World – made its début on Australia’s Gold Coast in 1991. Europe had to wait until 2002 for its first Warner park, which opened in Madrid, and although it is still operating, its sister park in Germany dropped the Warner brand when it changed ownership in 2005.

A Whole New World

The most transformative development in Warner’s theme park history came in 2018 when the doors swung open to Warner Bros. World on Abu Dhabi’s Yas Island. Originally the world’s largest indoor park, as this author has reported, it is also one of the most immersive thanks to its indoor environment being filled with decor which is too elaborate to be exposed to the elements in an open-air park.

Warner Bros. World has become a flagship for the Warner Bros. brand and proved the studio’s potential in themed entertainment. No expense has been spared in the park thanks to the deep pockets of its owner Miral, a specialist leisure operator backed by the Abu Dhabi government. The quality of Miral’s parks is arguably more consistent than even Disney’s or Universal’s and it includes SeaWorld Abu Dhabi, the second most-visited theme park in the Middle East after Dubai’s Global Village as this report revealed.

Unlike rival studios, Warner generally doesn’t own its parks so doesn’t need an in-house design division for them. Instead it relies on outside agencies meaning that the styles and standards of the attractions can differ from park to park. Miral’s aim was to build a park which could compete with the best in the world so it needed a design agency formed from animation aficionados. That’s exactly what it got.

Thinkwell, a division of design giants TAIT, was founded in 2001 by former Universal Studios park designers who didn’t want to relocate when the company moved its creative team from the west coast to Orlando. They set up a boutique design studio which has gone on to get a reputation for creating some of the industry’s most immersive and engaging attractions thanks to their passionate approach.

Thinkwell has designed attractions for Universal Studios Singapore and the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in Hollywood but perhaps its best-known work is across the pond.

In 2012 Warner launched a backstage tour of Britain’s Leavesden Studios where all eight Harry Potter movies were made. It takes guests deep behind the scenes of the movies about the boy wizard by showcasing concept art for the characters, models of all sizes, costumes complete with video descriptions and of course props.

They range from rows and rows of wands to cabinets containing full-size robotic creatures from the films which move at the push of a button. Then come the actual sets where the movies were made. Guests can walk past the wonky buildings of Diagon Alley and even step into the famed Great Hall of Hogwarts Castle.

A Spellbinding Performance

Warner Bros. produced all of the Potter movies so you wouldn’t have thought it would need assistance to make the tour. However, such is Thinkwell’s reputation that the studio got it involved right from the start on master planning, design and installation. Warner Bros. was so happy with the end result that it even commissioned Thinkwell to work on the behind the scenes tour at its own headquarters in Burbank, California. Indeed, as I have reported, the Potter tour in Britain has been so successful that an offshoot has opened in Tokyo with another on the way in Shanghai.

The tours are joined by Harry Potter stores, stage shows, a drone show and touring attractions. Harry Potter: The Exhibition showcases replicas of movie props, the Forbidden Forest Experience is an outdoor nighttime trail, the Yule Ball Celebration is a dinner show while Visions of Magic and Magic at Play are immersive interactive experiences.

It doesn’t stop at tours. Potter casts a more powerful spell in theme parks than any other Warner Bros. franchise. As this Forbes report from 2019 revealed, all of the theme parks featuring Potter lands had double-digit attendance gains in the year that the attractions made their debut. However, they are currently all operated by Universal as Warner Bros. granted it the Potter theme park rights in 2007 so it is well-served with attractions.

Only a few markets fall outside Universal’s deal, chief of which is the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which is why Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi will be getting the world’s first Potter land featuring the iconic locations of Hogwarts Castle, Diagon Alley and the Forbidden Forest as I revealed in March.

The Potter land will be the first area at Warner Bros. World which is based on a live action franchise. That’s because the rest of the park is focused on cartoon characters as is generally the case with the other Warner Bros. outposts as well as the Six Flags attractions. It means there are currently no attractions based on television and film favorites like Lord of the Rings, Lethal Weapon, Game of Thrones and Gremlins, which Warner Bros. recently announced will get a third instalment in 2028.

The city of Chongqing in China is rumored to be getting a Warner Bros. park and the studio’s new owner could afford to bankroll many more as Paramount is controlled by billionaire Oracle scion David Ellison’s Skydance Media. However, other parks may be a higher priority for him.

Paramount was once quite a player in the United States leisure industry as it bought a portfolio of regional theme parks in 1992. However, in 2006 it sold them for $1.2 billion to Cedar Fair which merged with Six Flags 18 years later.

It left Paramount with no parks so it began exploring sites all over the world and had a rollercoaster ride. Parks in South Korea and Bali are believed to be under consideration while others in Spain, the United Kingdom and Dubai failed to get off the drawing board. Instead, Dubai ended up with the world’s only Paramount-branded hotels which are amongst its most luxurious city center properties.

At the other end of the spectrum are the resorts themed to Paramount’s kids’ media network, Nickelodeon, which tend to have on-site water parks and are filled with models of characters like SpongeBob SquarePants. Nickelodeon has also licensed the characters to Norwegian Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean with the latest partnership with the latter being the SpongeBob Musical which will debut next year on the Hero of the Seas ship.

A more exhilarating attraction is due to land in Las Vegas in two years. Developed by dining impresario Bill Allen and Mark Advent, creator of Vegas’ iconic New York-New York resort, the Top Gun-themed attraction will include rides, immersive experiences, dining and retail. It should help to lift the visibility of Paramount’s brand in themed entertainment but not as much as a full-blown park would. Its magic touch would stretch far beyond the park gates.

Watching Paramount’s movies would make children ask their parents to take them to the park that is based on them. Gift shops selling merchandise featuring the characters in the rides would sit at the exits of the attractions so that riders have to pass through them when they are in a carefree frame of mind. This would increase the chance that they will buy the merchandise and when their kids see it at home it would remind them of the happy time they had in the park. In turn, this would cause them to pester their parents to book a return visit beginning the cycle again from scratch.

Paramount Importance

With no theme parks under its wings, Paramount has more of a need than Warner Bros. and the acquisition gives it a foot in the door of perhaps the most logical location.

Given Yas Island’s glittering track record, Paramount could be safe in the knowledge that a park there would put the studio on the global map of themed entertainment. What’s more, it would also help Abu Dhabi’s government achieve its tourism objectives.

The government invests in theme parks in order to attract tourists and generate a new source of revenue. This diversifies its economy away from fossil fuels which built its fortune but are beginning to run out. Theme parks have the capacity to welcome millions of people and act as beacons to attract them from afar which explains why they are the crown jewel of Abu Dhabi’s diversification strategy. The more theme parks there are on Yas Island, the longer visitors will stay, the more they will spend and the more it will diversify Abu Dhabi’s economy.

Yas Island already features perhaps the widest range of attractions of any entertainment complex worldwide. They include a marina, an arena, a mega mall with 370 shops, deluxe hotels, beaches, a race circuit, the world’s tallest indoor climbing wall and a golf course which hosts a round of the PGA European Tour. They are all within walking distance of four world-class theme parks – Warner Bros. World, SeaWorld, Ferrari World and Yas Waterworld – with a Disney park, an offshoot of the Vegas Sphere and the Potter land all on the way. It doesn’t stop there.

In an interview with me, Miral’s visionary chief executive Mohamed Al Zaabi, revealed what is to come on Yas Island. “We have planned for the coming 15 years, I would say, adding more attractions, more theme parks, more hotels, more rooms.” Two years earlier he told me that “60% [of Yas Island is developed already]. Still 40 to go”, so there is no shortage of space.

No Walk In The Park

When it comes to adding more theme parks, the hurdle is finding major brands which aren’t there already. Nintendo is one of the biggest but it has a deal with Universal and there is no evidence it excludes the Middle East.

It is highly unlikely that Universal itself would agree to be on the same site as its arch-rival Disney, even though that would perhaps be the most logical option. There is no precedent of Netflix working with park operators and instead it tends to focus on traveling experiences including one based on its Stranger Things show which has already visited Yas Island.

Sony has theme park partnerships with Dubai’s Motiongate and Legoland owner Merlin while the rights to popular manga franchise Dragon Ball Z have even been licensed to Saudi Arabia’s Qiddiya Investment Company which is developing a park near the country’s capital Riyadh and is investing $7 billion to build three other parks on the outskirts of Paris. It seems unlikely that Miral will replicate this kind of model.

Although Warner Bros. owns the rights to the contents and design of its Abu Dhabi park, Miral owns the land and the building itself. It could collaborate with Warner Bros. to bring it to other countries but in 2023 Al Zaabi dismissed that idea.

“Our focus is here in Abu Dhabi,” he said. “To be honest, we have enough on our shoulders. The plate is full. We are very busy. Over a stretch, do you have time to study that and think about that? That’s a question mark.”

Paramount is one of the few major brands that isn’t already committed to Yas Island making it an obvious contender, especially as it now has a sister park on the site following the Warner Bros. takeover. That’s not all.

Dave Cobb, the design wizard who spearheaded the Warner Bros. World project for Thinkwell is now vice president of creative for Paramount Global Experiences, where he leads creative vision across theme parks, attractions, exhibitions, hotels, resorts and other immersive projects using the studio’s brands.

A 40-year veteran of the theme park industry, Cobb started as a studio tour guide at Universal Studios Hollywood in 1987 and went on to work on many of the chain’s most cherished rides including Back to the Future: The Ride, Terminator 2: 3-D and, most notably, Men in Black: Alien Attack where he was creative director.

Thanks to Cobb’s magic touch on Warner Bros. World the park recently became the first attraction in the Middle East to win the Liseberg Applause Award – the themed entertainment industry’s equivalent of top honors at the Oscars. If he could repeat that feat with a Paramount park it really would be a happy ending.

Additional Research by Chris Sylt