“We’ll believe it when we see it.”
That’s the attitude that a lot of theme park aficionados seem to have when it comes to out-of-the-blue announcements of would-be destination parks that suddenly, inexplicably pop up every once in a while… Their disbelief makes sense. Most of the time, grand plans announced by nameless corporations to create “the next Disney World” are accompanied by very nice concept art and a wave of press releases… then endure decade-long bouts of “will-they-or-won’t-they” updates before quietly disappearing. Long story short: the multi-billion dollar construction of “the Disneyland of (insert rural state here)” just doesn’t tend to be a good bet.
Especially today, it seems that unless you’ve got a major entertainment company underwriting a park’s design and construction, things generally don’t move beyond the “flashy concept art” stage. That’s not to say that we haven’t been surprised! After all, much has been said about Evermore in Utah, and we fell in love with Lost Island – a rare new, major, independent, from-scratch theme park that opened last year in Iowa. But the list of parks that never make it to the opening they promised is long. So today, let’s look at a few other announced-then-abandoned parks and see if Heartland is likely to join them.
1. London Resort
Billed as (of course) “UK Disneyland,” the London Resort project was launched in 2012, with a target opening in 2019. Originally, the ambitious plans called for this entertainment destination on the UK’s southeast coast to include an indoor water park, theaters, live music venues, cinemas, restaurants, event spaces and hotels, all centered on a theme park.
As planned, the park would contain seven themed lands that (unsurprisingly) draw from the precedent of Disney – High Street, The Jungle, The Woods, The Kingdom, The Isles, Starport, and The Studio. A preliminary price tag of £3.5 billion would put the project on par with the development of Shanghai Disneyland… albeit, in this case, it was unclear how (much less from whom) the funding would come.
In 2021 – despite being two years passed its planned opening and with no dirt having been moved – the would-be park’s would-be leaders announced that they’d also add a dinosaur-themed land, including a triple-launch roller coaster, a family coaster, a 1500 seat indoor show, a 4D motion-base dark ride, an interactive gaming dark ride, a play area, ziplines, and two food and beverage locations. It was an oddly specific announcement for a park that was a decade past its announcement and still seemed entirely implausible.
Plans for the London Resort were filed and pulled (and re-filed re-pulled) time and time again throughout the 2010s, becoming less and less likely with each go-round. In 2022, the “London Resort Company Holdings” entered administration – essentially, the British equivalent of bankruptcy. And as many predicted from the moment it was announced a decade ago, it seems highly unlikely we’ll ever see the London Resort take shape.
2. Paramount Park(s)
Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. all have substantial footprints in the theme park market. Paramount’s story is a little different. In the ’90s, Paramount entered the red hot theme park business not by opening a “studio park” (like Universal) or licensing their brands (like Warner Bros.), but by purchasing a chain of already-successful, regional, seasonal, coaster-oriented theme parks. In the lead-up to the Great Recession, Paramount (then owned by Viacom) offloaded its non-core assets, selling the parks to Cedar Fair. And they’ve stayed out of the business since.
Well… sorta kinda. Just months after abandoning the owning and operation of their U.S. parks, Viacom announced that they would instead license their studio’s brand to a new Paramount Park in South Korea. It could’ve been a great park. Viacom’s catalogue (which includes Paramount, CBS, MTV, and Nickelodeon) boasts such major IPs as Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, Titanic, Grease, The Italian Job, Spongebob Squarepants, Tomb Raider, Avatar – The Last Airbender, Transformers, and Star Trek – all substantial IPs that are largely unrepresented in the theme park industry. But of course, it didn’t happen.
In 2011, a new “Paramount Park” was announced for Murcia, Spain, instead. To say that plans were stop-and-go would be an understatement. 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. We took a tour of the odd story of Paramount’s wannabe Disneyland in a feature on Theme Park Tourist ten years ago! And of course, it was never built.
Despite its earlier failure, a second attempt at a Paramount Park in South Korea was announced in 2018 (and predictably, seems almost certainly cancelled). As a cherry on top, in 2019 Paramount announced that it had gladly signed on to have its name and licenses applied to… the London Resort – a short-lived, doomed partnership.
3. Disney’s America, WestCOT, and DisneySea
Perhaps the most well-known announced-but-unbuilt theme parks are actually Disney’s. Disney has had several high profile theme parks that have been made official, only to never actually become a thing.
For example, we dove deep into Disney’s America – a park planned for a rural area outside of Washington, D.C. in Virginia in the 1990s. There, Imagineers would’ve axed the characters and offered a thoughtful, reflective, and “real” living history park telling the story of America. (It’s no surprise that some are calling the recently-announced American Heartland park a revival of the Disney plans.)
You can understand why historians would take issue with the perceived shortcuts and shifts Disney might’ve taken with their “retelling” of American history, causing major pushback. Ultimately, Disney’s America didn’t happen, which is probably good because it’s difficult to imagine today’s Disney wanting anything to do with a park like that.
In the same “Disney Decade” of big, broken promises, California almost played host to two mega-parks. Planned to be built next to the original Disneyland, WESTCOT would’ve been a modernized, naturalized, and glowing West Coast version of EPCOT.
Meanwhile, just 30 minutes west, Disney’s (short-lived) ownership of the Queen Mary ocean liner spurred the development of a park called DisneySea – a nautical adventure park that would serve as the centerpiece of a new, second California resort called Port Disney.
Frankly, it’s unlikely that both WESTCOT and DisneySea would’ve happened anyway. (More than likely, Disney used the concepts to create a bidding war between Anaheim and Long Beach to see who would offer the better tax subsidies.) Ultimately, neither happened. Like so much in the ’90s, the financial failure of Disneyland Paris and the subsequent downsizing of Disney’s theme park ambitions spelled the end of both projects, and the lower cost Disney’s California Adventure was built instead.
But even Disney’s three canned parks are nothing compared to the abandonment of a major new international entertainment destination that Disney allegedly once considered being a part of… and maybe, nothing compared to the promises being made by American Heartland… Read on…
4. The parks of Dubailand
Perhaps the king of all failed theme park developments, Dubailand was announced in 2003 as a $64 billion entertainment venture that would artificially inflate Dubai in the oil-rich nation of the United Arab Emirates into a world-class destination. Part of the Middle East’s jaw-dropping investment Everyone wanted a piece of Dubai.
In March 2008, Six Flags Dubailand was announced with a planned 2011 opening. (The project was re-announced in 2016.) Melding Six Flags thrills with big budget theming, this “next generation” thrill park would’ve been a flagship of the company.
And so it went for a (pre-Disney) Marvel Super Hero Theme Park theme park announced in 2007, a DreamWorks Theme Park, an Arabian Legend Theme Park, and a whole park dedicated to a regional children’s show called Freej (the equivalent of a Peppa Pig World, you might say), each earmarked for Dubailand.
Three months after that in July 2008, Universal Studios Dubailand was made official. With “Hollywood,” “New York,” “Surf City,” “Epic Adventures,” and “Legendary Heroes” areas, the new park was promised by a copy of its iconic art deco archway being built on the desert parcel it would occupy… a tease of what was to come.
Though unconfirmed, there are even rumors that Disney had drafted plans for a compact “Disneyland Dubai,” with the unconfirmed concept art above believed to be a draft of the concept.
(If it’s to be believed, ideas floated for the park at some stage involved a storybook entry land, a Star Wars land, Cars Land, Adventureland, and an enclosed, indoor Pixar area – though Disney concept art is notoriously flowery and this art could represent the project any any number of stages of development.)
But no one went bigger than Busch Entertainment (then-owners of SeaWorld), who announced in 2008 that they would open a multi-park resort complex called Worlds of Discovery in Dubai, with the iconic Palm Jebel Ali (a man-made archipelago of palm-shaped islands) gaining an orca-shaped island as its crown. That whale-shaped island would contain a SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, Discovery Cove, and Aquatica waterpark, all scheduled to open in 2012.
But Dubailand and its influx of major operators wasn’t to be. Even though it felt like a weird fever dream to imagine the all-at-once, master-planned construction of a brand new Orlando in the Middle East, it very much seemed like Dubailand was really going to happen. But… it didn’t. The Global Recession of 2008 crippled the tourism industry. Many of the companies who’d planned to license big name brands in Dubailand went under. Quietly and one-by-one, Six Flags, Universal, Marvel, DreamWorks, and other announced projects went silent, then dropped out altogether.
Much of the infrastructure that would’ve contained the first phase of Dubailand still remains today, overtaken by desert. Though operators tried to make the Middle East happen throughout the 2010s, fans quickly learned to have a “believe it when I see it” attitude when it came to ambitious parks there – even ones tied to trusted IPs.
Small pockets of the Middle East have indeed succeeded. For example, “Dubai Parks & Resorts” contained a LEGOLAND and the infamous MotionGate Dubai; 30 minutes away, IMG Worlds of Adventure is an indoor park licensing Marvel and Cartoon Network; and an hour south in Abu Dhabi, Ferrari World, SeaWorld Abu Dhabi, and Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi are each substantial and unique parks in their own right.
5. American Heartland(?)
… Which brings us back to American Heartland.
The $2 billion endeavor is billed as a “division” of Mansion Entertainment Group – a Missouri-based broadcast and production company that claims to have experience in “film, television, animation, music, theatre, and family immersive entertainment” and “producing high-quality, wholesome content that the entire family can enjoy.”
The next endeavor – announced amid much fanfare in summer 2023 – is American Heartland, a “Disneyland of the Midwest” ostensibly meant to celebrate all that makes the United States great. The 125 acre theme park supposedly coming to a rural town of just 5,000 residents in northeast Oklahoma is positioned as the centerpiece of a larger, 1,000 acre resort that is also meant to include an RV park, campground, a 300-room hotel, and an indoor waterpark.
The park’s messaging has majorly centered on the involvement of Disney Imagineers (thanks to the involvement of THG Creative, the firm hired to do the planning a design-build for the park).
According to American Heartland, the park will include “six distinctly American lands” – Great Plains, Bayou Bay, Big Timber Falls, Stony Point Harbor, Liberty Village, and Electropolis. Substantial packages of concept art paint the picture of a park filled with E-Ticket experiences.
If it happens, the park will have a lot to live up to. Concept art certainly suggests that this park would be “Disney quality” in terms and its environments, painting pictures of the “Big Timber Falls” log flume…
… or of Bayou Bay (with a “swamp thrill ride” and a voodoo-themed haunted house)…
… or of Electropolis, where concept art for Universal’s VelociCoaster has not-so-subtly been co-opted to suggest that a waterfront roller coaster will launch through a vibrant, neon cityscape.
There’s a “Route 66” that encircles the park, with guests driving themselves rather than riding a railroad as at Disneyland; there are multimedia theaters of American history; explorable sailing ships; a dark ride that sends guests through the legends of a haunted lighthouse…
In other words, if this park really happens – and if it looks anywhere near as good as the concept art THG has produced – it may actually make us eat our words and rocket this Oklahoma park to the top of many bucket lists. But let’s be clear: those are some very big ifs.
Vice President of Marketing for Mansion Entertainment Group, Kristy Adams, says: “At this time, we don’t have any investors involved. It’s just privately funded, but the money is secured.” While that sounds promising, it’s also somewhat vague. If an upstart production company with apparently no real credits to its name in Missouri secretly secured $2 billion – half the price Disney spent to acquire Marvel – it seems like something someone would’ve noticed?
For now, Mansion maintains that we should expect the first phase of American Heartland (the campground and RV park) to open in 2025, and that the theme park itself will follow very soon after, in 2026.
But we’ve got to ask you… would you bet money on American Heartland opening in 2026, or ever? Or do you think this very lofty idea will end up like the other parks on this list, quietly disappearing into “whatever happened to…?” conversations and “yep, it was never really going to happen” territory?
