For five years, plans for a Paramount-branded park in Spain had been stop-and-go. The planning forces behind the project announced rides, then cancelled the park; set up construction walls, then cancelled the park again; released concept art; then stalled construction.
In 2014, the green light illuminated once again as backers of Paramount Park in Murcia, Spain announced that they had found the funding they sought. At that point, official plans, 3D renderings, ride details, and a commitment to start construction immediately were released, all with the promise that Paramount Park would have a grand opening in 2015!
Problem is, 2015 came and went… with no movement on Paramount Park. As of early 2016, the local media suggests that “only a very brave and optimistic man would bet on construction starting within the near future.” (Similarly nightmarish cancellations have plagued the other announced Paramount Parks in the UK and South Korea, neither of which has come close to materializing.)
We now feel confidently here that Paramount Park will never materialize. If it had ever come to life, the theme park would’ve been only one element of a massive resort that promised a “CityWalk” style shopping, dining, and dancing complex, no less than seven massive resort hotels, a “Lifestyle” center, a convention center, an exhibition hall, condos, a casino, and a mall. (Is anyone else getting Disneyland Paris flashbacks of high expectations, empty hotels, and crushing debt?)
Even if Paramount Park’s death is all-but-announced, we still have to look at the official plans for this would-be Spanish tourist attraction and gawk. Paramount Park would have been one of the most unusual, odd, and – frankly – uninteresting major theme parks on Earth from the moment it opened. Wait strange, outdated, and mismatched stories awaited within this blatant copy of a Disney park? Let’s find out.
Paramount Park Problems
But what could we have expected to see in Paramount Park per its most current plans? To be frank: here you’ll find an all-too-familiar formula. Physically, the park’s set-up is straight out of Universal’s Islands of Adventure: themed “islands” situated around a central lagoon, circumnavigated by an outer loop.
While the park’s physical layout obviously follows the lead of Universal, the most shocking and off-putting element of the park is the actual contents of those lands. When encountered clockwise around the lagoon, they exactly and specificially mirror Disneyland’s lands: adventure, frontier, fantasy, and future. The blatant and surprisingly straightforward “borrowing” of Disney’s lands would initially be odd enough. But in this most unusual park, those themed lands are stuffed with Paramount’s unusual collection of intellectual property.
In other words, we might imagine that in an ideal world, the park’s designers working closely with Paramount would choose the best of Paramount’s vast intellectual property library and craft cinematic themed lands around them. Quite the contrary, designers appear to have rigidly selected Disney’s go-to lands and shoehorned in whichever of Paramount’s properties would make any modicum of sense in each, regardless of their popularity or quality.
Alain Littaye of Disney and More has the details, and we’ll summarize what we know here.
Paseo Paramount
A mix of Downtown Disney and familiar entry lands, Paseo Paramount will be a larger-than-life avenue of shops and restaurants with more grandeur than most park’s opening lands tend to convey. Following in the DisneySea route, expect that this plaza’s grand scale will largely be thanks to an embedded Paramount Park Hotel adding height, depth, and grandeur… plus an exclusive park entrance for hotel guests.
It will empty into a “hub” on the edge of the lagoon. While this proposed Paramount Park certainly borrows heavily from Disney’s tried-and-true formula, this new take on “Main Street” is certainly not timeless. Rather, Paseo Paramount is supposed to come across as modern and thriving, with pulsating fountains dancing to modern music and the cutting edge “Paramount Live” amphitheatre bringing the studio’s films to life.
Taking another queue from Disney’s classic park layout, guests emptying into the “hub” at the end of Paseo Paramount will find familiar motifs in familiar places: Adventure City to the left and Plaza Futura to the right, very closely mirroring the placement of Disney’s Adventureland and Tomorrowland.
Adventure City
Despite the similarities to the name and placement of Disney’s Adventureland, Adventure City will not be set in an exotic jungle. In fact, it’s the beginning of the odd choice of intellectual properties selected for this park, each seemingly forced into nonsensical nooks and crannies. Especially here in this all-encompassing “Adventure City,” all bets are off as time periods, genres, and films collide.
The land’s major draw (and probably the biggest draw at the park) will be a ride based on Mission: Impossible, seemingly using the technology behind Universal’s Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man and Transformer: The Ride – 3D. Is Mission: Impossible really the most engrossing and worthwhile action film in Paramount’s extensive library? Perhaps it is…
Otherwise, the land will very oddly contain a bumper cars attraction and an associated quick-service diner based on Grease, and a recreation of the iconic Osteria Corleone restaurant from The Godfather. The unusual juxtaposition continues.
Rango’s West
Filling the conceptual role and physical plot occupied by Disney’s Frontierland is Rango’s West, based on the 2011 film by Gore Verbinski and starring Johnny Depp as a pet chameleon lost in the Mojave Desert. The film performed alright at the box-office and was critically well-received, but seems to have about as much pop culture influence as Avatar… and at least Avatar has sequels on the way.
Essentially merging the concepts of Frontierland with Disney’s “a bug’s land” or Toy Story Playland, the idea is that you’re shrunk down to the size of a chameleon in an Old West city made up of disgarded objects, all centered around a character that most families probably couldn’t pick out of a line-up. Rango isn’t a very strong intellectual property to begin with, but it seems that in order to have a “frontier” themed land (which, obviously, they have to have), it was the most worthwhile option in Paramount’s library?
The land will include a family mine train roller coaster named Spirit of the West, and Rango’s Rootin’ Tootin’ 4D Spectacular, where Rango will narrate a collection of film splices that will include Paramount’s vast catalogue of classic Western films. There’s also Rango’s Ragin’ Rapids ride.
The whole land will be set among a larger-than-life world where buildings are made of moonshine jugs and discarded barrels. While it’ll be an impressive looking area, we can’t help but wonder if Rango is really the best example of a Western that the park’s design team could find to incorporate? It may have been a worthwhile risk during the park’s 2010 planning and announcement when the opportunity for synergy was ripe, but at this point, is Rango worth having at all?
But it gets stranger… Our tour around the would-be Paramount Park continues in the park’s warped and dark version of an outdated Fantasyland. Read on…
Enchanted Forest
Obviously, any self-respecting theme park will have an entire land – likely in the rear center of the park – themed to works of fantasy and fairytales. Problem is that Disney’s beloved collection of animated classics and cross-generational appeal is missing from Paramount’s library, so their best emulation of Fantasyland will be divided into three sub-areas, each more astoundingly unexpected than the one before.
The land will be entered via Sleepy Hollow, based on Tim Burton’s 1999 film of the same name (coincidentally, also starring Johnny Depp). A morose and grey village, the Sleepy Hollow sub-section might not look much like Disney’s Fantasyland, so instead consider it the park’s version of Libery Square – a colonial plot connecting the frontier and fantasy areas. This area of the land will be centered around the dead tree from the film, and would likely prove to be an atmospheric and stylish area.
Since Sleepy Hollow is a very blatant take on Magic Kingdom’s Liberty Square, it’ll likewise include the park’s haunted house, in this case a 3D attraction incorporating live actors.
The second sub-area is themed to 2008’s Nickelodeon-branded fantasy-adventure The Spiderwick Chronicles. Like Rango, we have to wonder if the designers behind this park had any foresight whatsoever, or if they were tasked with cramming the hottest films of the late aughts into the park with no care for the future.
Put another way: The Spiderwick Chronicles debuted in 2008. By the park’s announcement in 2010, it must’ve already been clear that the Nickelodeon film was far from evergreen and that it had already slipped out of pop culture. Now, today, we can see very clearly that today’s children are already unaware of the film – a problem that’ll get worse with each passing year. Does Paramount really have no property that can fit in the obligatory “family fantasy land” with more longevity and staying power? The Spiderwick Chronicles is the best they’ve got? Either way, this sub-area within Fantasyland… er, Enchanted Forest… will include a shooting dark ride that may be trackless, revolving around the hunt for the film’s antagonistic Ogre.
The final area within Enchanted Forest will be a fantastical realm based on 2007’s Stardust, a film that certainly has never entered public consciousness for even a moment. This area will include the park’s carousel, a kid’s roller coaster, a hedge maze, and a boat ride through a world inhabited with fairies (albeit, different fairies than the ones you’ll see in the Spiderwick Chronicles dark ride…).
The resort’s second deluxe in-park hotel will border the Enchanted Forest.
Plaza Futura
Containing the park’s equivalent of Tomorrowland (in name and placement), Plaza Futura will be chiefly based on Paramount’s Star Trek, making it perhaps the only land in the park with a big name to draw on. Star Trek arguably has a fan base equivalent in size and fervor to Star Wars, and the property may be Paramount’s coup… Like Disney’s Tomorrowland, Plaza Futura is poised to contain the park’s more thrilling rides set amid a space-themed port.
So far, we know of two of the land’s offerings: the first is a flight motion simulator ride through the Star Trek universe. If that sounds blindingly similar to Disney’s Star Tours (a flight motion simulator through the Star Wars universe), then we’re on the same page. The concept art above signals that the planned Star Trek ride is likely a very intentional and exact rehash of Star Tours, just given a Star Trek overlay.
The second attraction is so far referred to as the Warp Speed Coaster. While at first glance, it may be understood as the equivalent of Space Mountain, the launched, 100-foot tall coaster takes place entirely outdoors but for its launch. You could call it an original.
Despite the almost complete immersion into the Star Trek world, this Plaza Futura land is not entirely dedicated to the franchise… It’s also planned to be home to a restaurant themed to War of the Worlds. Yes, a restaurant.
Our Thoughts
Paramount Park is going to be pretty impressive to look at. The details are there, and it appears that landscaping and architecture will be thoughtful and extravagant. But it feels like something is just… off. The sincerely odd choice of intellectual properties used in the park is just unsettling. Were people really clamoring for a Stardust ride? Is Spiderwick Chronicles the best Paramount can find in their canon for a Fantasyland? Is Rango the studios’ most worthy Western? Is Mission: Impossible the best fit for Spider-Man’s incredible motion-based dark ride technology?
Star Trek may be the park’s saving grace, but even that will amount to a lightly themed outdoor roller coaster and a very blatant rip-off of Star Tours.
It feels like Paramount Park lacked an identity. With almost exactly the same layout as Disney’s Magic Kingdom parks (clockwise from entry, featuring lands based on adventure, frontier, fantasy, future) and drawing on a less-than-stellar collection of films, Paramount Park felt a little soulless. At the end of the day, if you can’t beat Disney’s castle-park formula (and trust us, you can’t), then avoid it. Shoehorning in Paramount’s less-than-stellar films just for the sake of having lands that match Disney’s is just… stupid. It feels like it lacks an identity… It’s empty.
And with seven hotels depending primarily on the park to fill their rooms, empty is the last thing developers would’ve wanted the park to be. Not to mention, almost all of the films planned for the park are from 2006 – 2010. You could argue that they made sense in 2010 when the park was announced, but really… did they? A permanent theme park with permanent lands and attractions needs properties that don’t age. Even by 2010, it should’ve been clear that many of the stories selected for Paramount Park simply weren’t going to be classics 20 years later. Even now, 5 years later, most of the intellectual properties planned for the park are completely and utterly forgotten by pop culture. So what might the park have looked like in 2020? 2040? 2060? If they can’t stand the test of time, why have them at all?
Paramount Park was also budgeted at €390 million (about $530 million), which is about half of what Disney invested in fixing Disney California Adventure eight years earlier. And when investors announced that construction would start in 2014 with a 2015 opening, you have to wonder how grand the park really could’ve been if they thought it would’ve taken only a year to build. Even assuming it had opened in late 2015, that wouldn’t have been even two years of construction, when a single well-done land at a Disney Park can take 3 – 5 years.
Even more surprising, Paramount owned and operated parks in the United States for years, designing and building attractions based on Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Italian Job, The Outer Limits, and Nickelodeon, all of which could really easily support their own themed lands, but were entirely absent from Paramount Park plans in any way.
So now it’s up to the people to decide. Will Paramount Park still appear, and be a runaway success and finally prove that stories beyond Universal and Disney’s canon can support a thoughtful and detailed park? Or is this park dead on arrival and drawing from a lackluster collection of stories? Will it even be built at all? Looking at these plans today, is this park even worth building? Or is this on-again-off-again park doomed to wither one way or another?
