Nickelodeon Presents The Salvation Army Feast Of Sharing (Photo : Getty Images)
In a bid to capture the yuan of China’s growing middle- and upper-class, another company is building a theme park in China, adding to the growing number of resorts being constructed across the country. On Wednesday, Viacom broke ground for the Nickelodeon Cultural Resort in Foshan City.
The $1.71-billion theme park is part of the bigger Foshan Cultural and Ecological Coastal Project covering 750 acres of land. The Nickelodeon theme park, scheduled to open in 2020, would occupy 250 acres, Entgroup reported.
Nickelodeon Characters
Ron Johnson, executive vice president of Nickelodeon and Viacom Consumer Products, did not identify yet the upcoming attractions of the theme park. But he said Chinese families would have the opportunity to interact with Nickelodeon characters such as Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Sanshui New Town Management Committee, an entity backed by the government and tasked with the development of Foshan’s Sanshui District, and Elite Global Group, a conglomerate in Hong Kong, are Viacom’s partners for the Nickelodeon theme park. Entertainment companies and developers are rushing to get a bigger slice of the middle-class money by building more theme parks and resorts across China.
Among those with ongoing projects are Universal which targets 2020 also as the opening of its upcoming Beijing theme park, the Dalian Wanda Group which is constructing a $9.5-billion theme park in Jinan and Six Flags Entertainment currently building a $4.48-billion theme park in Chongqing. The park in Jinan is just one of the many that Dalian Wanda plans to build across China in its attempt to force the newly opened Shanghai Disneyland to eventually close by dwarfing it with Dalian Wanda-branded resorts.
Theme Parks Galore
Similar to the theater situation wherein China overtook the U.S. before 2016 closed as having the biggest number of movie screens, a report released in November by Euromonitor International and World Travel Market, research companies, said in the next few years, the theme park industry in China would also surpass the U.S. It projects $12 billion theme park ticket sales for China in 2020, up from $4.6 billion in 2015. For the same period, ticket sales in the U.S. would go up to $9 billion in 2020 from $8 billion in 2015.
Besides the Nickelodeon theme park in China, Viacom also announced it would build an undersea Nickelodeon Resort and Attraction in the Philippines. Slated to open in 2020, it would be part of the planned 400-hectare Coral World Park Undersea project in Coron, Palawan, considered the country’s last frontier. The undersea park would be the world’s first undersea attraction made up of 70 hectares for accommodation and 30 hectares for the attractions, also with the same characters found in Foshan who would promote protection of the ocean, according to Hollywood Reporter.
