Half-billion-dollar expansion for Hong Kong Disneyland
Disney, Hong Kong Government Reach Deal To Expand Hong Kong Theme Park
As part of the deal announced Tuesday, the government plans to convert a substantial amount of existing loans to the park into equity, but won't invest any new capital. Its stake in the park will fall to 52%...The physical size of the theme park, will increase by 23%, Lau said, with the new attractions aimed at broadening Disneyland's appeal to young adults...
In its first year of operations, visitors to Hong Kong Disneyland fell 400,000 short of the park's 5.6 million target. In its second year, attendance fell to just over 4 million visitors.
The park has also drawn criticism for lack of appeal to mainland Chinese tourists, who account for the bulk of its visitors, given their unfamiliarity with Disney stories and characters.
Disney said Tuesday the expansion will focus on "universally understood" stories, adding that many of the new attractions will be unique to the Hong Kong park.
(Image: 27601 - Hong Kong - Disneyland, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Xiquinhosilva's Flickr stream)
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Disney Hong Kong is a seriously wrong move for the HKSAR gov.
The park is small and honestly has no appeal to people who's 12 and above.
Instead of "universally understood" stories, why not crate attractions that appeal to the Chinese? Disney could do a version of the Monkey King, for example.
Apparently nobody working for Disney HK knows anything about China.
Perhaps they do know something about China, Nosehat, perhaps to do.
Me, I think that Disneyland is an evil place. But lots and lots and lots of people disagree with me.
On first glance I saw a giant breast behind that girl, instead of a cat. I hope that is just because I'm tired...
I dunno, at this point Disney has lost any advantage it has because its needs to be a dependable stock, not a successful corporation.
A friend of mine who worked for QA on their products was constantly galled by this. He would spend all day finding out if a product was either popular or offensive in certain regions. When he'd argue that a particular toy simply wasn't interesting or fun, he would be reminded that no, it had to be a cultural quirk, thousands of man hours were spent designing and researching these properties and they should work on any toy. There must have been a hand sticking out of place or some gesture that didn't work. For Disney "fun" was established early on in the process so no one ever needed to take a second look at that.
The problem sounds company wide. China is a big market, why not conquer it on it's own terms and then force the pre-conditioned west to eat it up, makes more sense to me.
@3,
"A friend of mine who worked for QA on their products was constantly galled by this."
Your friend is in the wrong position. QA is concerned with whether a product "works," in the sense of "is not broken." That's it.
QA is *never* concerned with "whether something will be commercially successful," or even whether it is designed correctly.
N.B. I am speaking about Software QA, but I "have the feeling" it is the same in other industries: it is the marketing and sales guys who are listened to re: whether a product will sell in a particular region. *Never* the QA manager, and certainly not the QA employees.
You friend is wasting his gall.
I haven't been following this story all that closely so some of my comments may be slightly incorrect, but as I seem to recall, Disney has been pushing for expansion for quite some time now, perhaps for the last year or two, and the government has been pushing back. Each side has been blaming the other for the delays in getting the approval to move forward.
Recently, Disney called it quits and announced they were scrapping their plans for expansion, publicly blamed the government for dragging their heels etc and made redundant their entire development team that were dedicated to drawing up plans, architecture, making the deals etc. It was relatively big local news for a day. And of course, the government still blamed disney for everything.
I guess it was a clever force of hand, because now both parties are shaking hands and the deal for expansion has been completed.
Each time I've taken my family there, it's been quite busy, but not heaving. But busy. Lots of Mainlanders, Honkies and the occasional Westerner. My daughter loves it there. Disney's only competition (ie only other theme park) is Ocean Park, which benefits from being on HK island and not miles away on Lantau.
A kind of American approach. It isn't really that profitable, so expand it until it is.
Funny that besides Mulan, Disney hasn't really exercised that cultural stripmining they've used to create such wealth in the past. There are a lot of stories besides the Woman Warrior that, properly presented, could open up a whole new market to them.
But then when you think of it, their intake has been through the eyes of western writers such as Kipling, etc. Too bad they didn't feature "Kim" with its intrigue, spycraft and education about the political climate using countries as pawns in the struggle between two world powers. More educational than the "Jungle Book" by far.
Expanding? Is there really any room left in Hong Kong for expansion of a place like this?
They can build the House of Yesterday, and show how high on the hog Americans lived in the last part of the 20th century, before the USA turned into a debtor's prison.
much whuffie will be gained. maybe they'll start the sim rides too!
Actually, Disney IS making an concious effort to do some localized strip-mining in the public domains of asian culture.
Case in point, the Magic Gourd, a recent Disney film not intended for american theatres at all:
http://www.dianying.com/en/news/view/309
More will follow, I´m sure.
@#2
You should know that most Chinese love Disney for its Western culture, won't care much if they really make it a Chinese thing.
We have enough Chinese thing already you know...
Thinking about how much money this will cost and all of the resources and waste required, not to mention the coal burned to power it all, I hope you remember at least a few times in the past when you nodded your head in solemn agreement with someone who was explaining how we (read: the world's population) are producing too much crap to be sustainable.
The HK government should just terminate the agreement, throw the stupid worthless brand away and save on the royalties!!
Kung Fu Panda! or was that not disney? i don't know.
The Disney corporation of today has nothing to do with the Disney that created Disneyland.
For them to recapture the "magic" would be nearly impossible at this point (though firing everyone at the top wouldn't be a bad place to start.)
I really think that they're missing out on an incredible market: Brazil. People and tour groups from Brazil come to Orlando all the time. Of course, tourism and trade are pretty important too so they may want to keep things local to the States. /shrug
The thing that has kind of bothered me recently at the parks (I can only speak for Orlando) is the homogenization of a lot of the places that were formerly very diverse. Pretty much all the shops sell the same boring swag (usually whatever manufactured teenie starlet is in vogue or the latest version of High School Musical). Of course, that's the stuff that pays the bills for all the important stuff, but sometime I wish Hanna Montana would stay in the local mall Disney store.
There used to be a creepy magic shop and video game arcade on Main Street. Sadly, no longer.
Not a huge Disney fan anymore, but it's going to be a while before the image of a blond Chinese lady dressed up as Alice in Wonderland dissolves from my fetid brain.