If you’ve been paying much attention to Theme Park Tourist over the past few years, you’ll no doubt have read about the ups and downs of California’s Great America – an amusement park located in Santa Clara, California.
In short, in 1976 (the American Bicentennial), Marriott – the hospitality company that today is best known for its hotels – opened two amusement parks, both called Marriott’s Great America. Within a decade, Marriott had apparently tired of running amusement parks and sold both off. One (outside of Chicago) was acquired by Six Flags in the ’80s and today remains one of the chain’s flagship parks as Six Flags Great America.
The other – and the subject of interest today – changed hands a bit differently. In 1985, Marriott sold its Californian Great America to the city of Santa Clara itself. Since the daily operation of an amusement park goes well beyond the interest of most municipalities, it’s no surprise that Santa Clara hired someone else to manage the park: the Ohio-based Kings Entertainment Company (KECO), who’d already proven their chops with Kings Island, Kings Dominion, and Canada’s Wonderland.
In 1989, the city of Santa Clara sold Great America to KECO outright. But there’s a catch… While KECO bought the park itself, the city actually retained the real estate is sat on.
Of course, in 1992, the Kings Entertainment Company was itself sold to Paramount Pictures, and in the same style as the sister parks it had been adopted into just three years earlier, the Santa Clara park was renamed Paramount’s Great America. The result is that both Six Flags and Paramount owned theme parks called “Great America,” and both with the same iconic entry, double-decker carousel, and even some of the same “lands” and rides.
With a recession on the horizon and in the midst of a corporate split (into Viacom and CBS), Paramount’s parent company decided to exit the theme park business, too. In 2006, amusement park operator Cedar Fair (owners of Cedar Point, Dorney Park, Geauga Lake, and more) purchased the Paramount Parks. Each was stripped of its “Paramount’s” prefix and its film references. To differentiate it from its long-lost Chicago sister, the Santa Clara park gained a new prefix: California’s Great America. Which brings us to today.
A sticky situation
For most of its life as California’s Great America, it’s been suspected that the Santa Clara park’s time was short… Why?
First of all, location, location, location. Santa Clara is, after all, located in the Bay Area – one of the hottest real estate markets on the globe. Right smack in the region of San Francisco and San Jose, every single acre of land that can be developed in the Bay Area has been developed. And by most any measure, the land that the park occupies is almost certainly worth more than the park itself. In short, the uncomfortable truth has always been that the annual rent payment Santa Clara (remember, the land owner) received from Cedar Fair is a fraction of the revenue that the city could make from a one-time sale.
Speaking of land, one of the biggest opponents to Great America was the idea of what could be in the spot: a brand new stadium for the San Francisco 49ers NFL team. For years, rumors consistently ebbed and flowed that Cedar Fair was willing to exit it contract to operate the park early for the right price, and that the 49ers and the city were collectively willing to find that price to secure such an unusually large parcel of land with built-in parking – perfect for a stadium.
Those rumors came to a head in 2011 when Cedar Fair announced that they had agreed to sell the park to JMA Ventures for $70 million, signaling their intent to abandon Great America and allow the 49ers to move in. But by December, they’d reversed course, announcing that the deal was off. Instead, Cedar Fair had recommitted to operating Great America and continuing its annual $5.3 million a year rent payment to Santa Clara…
More to the point, it had reached a “mutually beneficial” agreement with the 49ers, who built Levi’s Stadium next door in 2014, sharing Great America’s parking lot.
You can see, then, why the future of Great America has always been uncertain… But in 2019, the city of Santa Clara announced that at long last, they had found a buyer willing to pay $150 million for the land Great America sits on. The buyer? Cedar Fair. In a massive transaction (which exceeded Cedar Fair’s typically capital expenditure across its dozen parks combined), Cedar Fair officially reunited ownership of the park and the land it sits on. That might make you think that Great America’s future was at last guaranteed… But not quite.
Certainly, the 2020 pandemic took a major toll on the tourism industry. Cedar Fair no doubt took a look at its own portfolio and began to wonder if some of its smaller parks might best be sold off, or closed altogether to consolidate their rides and send them off to other parks in the chain. And sure, parks like Michigan’s Adventure or Valleyfair might not be stars in the park’s chain… but they’re also not very attractive to buyers. Great America, though? Talk about a payday…
In 2022, Cedar Fair announced that they had sold the land Great America sits on for $310 million (more than twice what they’d paid for the real estate three years earlier, representing a significant boon to the company). The buyer was Prologis – a “real estate investment trust” headquartered in San Francisco. As part of the sale, Prologis agreed to lease the land back to Cedar Fair for at least six years (with one optional five year extension thereafter). That means that anytime between now and 2033 at the latest, Cedar Fair will remove its rides (no doubt sending salvageable attractions to its other parks), leaving the vacant land behind.
The result is one of the first major, modern theme park closures we’ve seen in a very long time; when a corporate-backed, big-budget park of modern thrill rides – up to and including 2013’s GCI woodie Gold Striker and 2018’s headlining, single-rail RMC RailBlazer – will simply cease operation.
But the question is… leaving the land to whom? And that’s where things get interesting…
After a long, complicated history, it looks like California’s Great America will meet its end to help Cedar Fair’s ends meet. It’s easy to see why the $310 million sale of the land (and the ability to reclaim its rides) is a win-win for Cedar Fair. Said Cedar Fair President and CEO Richard A. Zimmerman in 2022: “For our investors, the sale and lease agreements allow us to monetize a high-value asset in the heart of Silicon Valley at a very attractive multiple. The transaction also provides us with a substantial sum of incremental capital which we intend to use to further advance our strategic priorities and generate enhanced returns for our unitholders.”
So we know what’s in it for Cedar Fair. But who, exactly, is Prologis – the “real estate investment trust” who paid big bucks to secure 112-acres beneath California’s Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, California?
Frankly, there’s nothing particularly thrilling about the San Francisco-based company. Essentially a giant real estate firm, Prologis is a sizable player in the development of industrial, advanced manufacturing and logistics projects. The company is reportedly “a major landlord” for Amazon, and touts having been the quiet developer behind Amazon’s distribution centers, warehouses, and other industrial facilities “in 19 markets, including the UK, China, Japan and the United States.”
But at least for those who’ve got their ear tuned to the rumors of the industry, an odd one had bubbled up… That maybe – just maybe – the client Prologis was hired by in this case isn’t interested in distribution warehouses at all, but in filmmaking ones.
Mickey in San Jose?
First of all, let’s be clear: according to the rumblings of entertainment insiders, if The Walt Disney Company is at all connected to the $310 million purchase of 112 acres in Central California’s Silicon Valley, it is likely not for a theme park.
It’s not that Disney hasn’t considered park acquisition before… Allegedly, Disney seriously crunched the numbers on acquiring Southern California’s Knott’s Berry Farm in the ’90s, believing that the park just up the street could be transformed into the never-built Possibilityland: Disney’s America. (Instead, the Knott family opted to sell their historic Californian park to Cedar Fair, who still owns the property to this day.) But in Great America’s case, Cedar Fair owns all the rides (which they’ll doubtlessly take with them).
Instead, it’s possible that once Great America is gone, Prologis’ client could very well be the filmmaking arm of The Walt Disney Company, for whom the 112-acre plot could become a movie studio and production facility. Even though it’s entirely rumor, there are certainly a few reasons that the idea has merit.
For one, Disney has recently found itself highly intertwined with a smaller, regional studio – Trilith Studios (formerly Pinewood Studios) in Atlanta, Georgia, above – where nearly all Marvel Studios films and television shows since 2015’s Ant-Man have been produced. It makes sense for Disney to establish its own regional production campus… and one that’s at least closer to the Californian homes of many of its stars, crew, and executives.
Speaking of which, a studio in San Francisco could prove to be a “Goldilocks” location for Disney – near enough to the company’s Burbank headquarters and many celebrity’s Los Angeles homes, but far enough to avoid some of the tax, union, and labor restrictions imposed on Southern California and the “studio zone” of Hollywood…
The rumor mill
Right now, the idea of Disney being the impetus behind Great America’s purchase is merely a rumor, and any association between Prologis and Disney is alleged at best. Even if it were true that Disney might’ve had interest in the property, the changing guard at The Walt Disney Company might mean that plans fall through or priorities shift altogether. Right now, consider this a far-fetched – but interesting – thought exercise with what Disney might want with a hundred acre campus near San Jose…
It’s equally likely, after all, that the Santa Clara property becomes an Amazon warehouse, or an industrial yard, or that it’s resold to another property investor, or that it yields office space, apartments, or mixed use retail to complement the nearby stadium and the region’s jaw-dropping real estate market. But for now, isn’t it fun to imagine what could be?
