#also the new editor botched the formatting on this like seventy times so i apologize if there are missing parts of errors. thanks tumblr

[mcbitchtits]

verdantrivers reblogged your post “i will not do theme park analysis of the jurassic...”

#do a theme park analysis of the jurassic world movies

so it’s worth noting I only ever saw the first jurassic world, and i thought it kind of sucked, so I never watched the rest of them.

my main reaction, aside from “i need seventy Margaritaville Isla Nublar” shirts, was that their whole park capacity was extremely low and the resort price of getting a single person in the park was going to be, like. $10,000 a day per person. so i think there’s a lot lacking in the sequels by way of the park conceit, but given the rest of the writing that’s not really surprising.

free range ride vehicles? lol. lmao. i mean i guess at $10K a day and negligible hourly capacity it becomes sort of a moot point, but i think the interesting thing about all of that is that the inevitable result is that this “theme park” is actually an extreme luxury resort. not “a luxury extreme resort”, but an “extreme luxury” resort. already the insanely wealthy are the only people who can afford to go, but you know what’s interesting about that? it’s kind of the same problem disneyland has right now.

DL has a capacity problem. they own a lot of land in anaheim but not enough for the number of people who want to go there. so for the past 20-30 years (i’m really approximating here), they’ve been jacking up ticket prices. supply and demand, right? if you only have so much capacity, then to drive disinterest, you increase the ticket prices. it hasn’t exactly worked; disney is so successful in being THE place that people want to go to and return to that there is definitely an amount of “we will pay anything” to go there. and now a one-day park hopper ticket for DL/DCA on a high capacity day are OVER TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS. just to get in the door! that doesn’t include parking ($30), or food, or souvenirs. or hotels. the highest DL pass (yeah yeah, it’s not a Pass anymore, whatever) is something like $1400.

and you know what? disney is not disincentivized for their parks to be seen as a “luxury” product. the disney parks are the most consistently profitable part of the entire disney company. and i can assure you that profit is not going back into the parks much; relatively no more than any other product arm gets funding. in fact, in mostly just gets bled dry. (RIP to all the great live entertainment that has suffered lately.)

so what happens when you drive prices up for decades, completely detached from actual value? (unrelated: did you know it costs like $30K annually to be a member of club 33?)

well, you have a new problem: an american “middle class” family is starting to realize that disney dream vacations are way out of their budget. WDW is up there too, not just DL, because the hotels and travel are expensive as hell also. but do you know what the number one predictor of a family taking their kids to disney parks is? if they went as a kid themselves. so what happens when you have a generation of people who couldn’t, who can’t, afford to go? well, we don’t know yet, and also disney doesn’t care, at least in DL, because their problem right now is they have too many people. they jacked up the prices and tried to limit capacity and all that’s done so far is get them sued by passholders! (i don’t imagine this suit will go anywhere, but i’m not a lawyer, so who knows.)

anyway, what does this all have to do with jurassic world? again, I didn’t see the latest two or three or whatever we’re on. so this really lacks significant nuance and is mostly a reaction to the post about how Dominion felt empty because it was suffering the same problems “as a park” that the movie suffers “as a franchise”. I.E. the park designers trying for New and Novel and Big and Exciting when really it’s all messy and empty and totally lacking the critical elements that make it substantial and interesting.

I do agree with that analysis as a franchise problem; I think it haunts almost every franchise, any kind of episodic storytelling-- the urge to up the narrative stakes by upping the risk. I think that’s a mistake though, because 1) you eventually run out of room narratively, if you’re continually successful, and 2) as you grow the scale of the story, you also start moving away from the intimacy of your characters. And it’s very, very, very difficult to maintain a consistently growing ensemble. the characters we see in dominion are flat and empty and the stakes are impersonal and vacuous and there’s no narrative tension anymore because we’re not invested. (theoretically, i say, having not seen it.)

But anyway.

so my understanding is that the company that owns the dinos is doing this in a bid to create Bigger and Better and Newer, regardless, of, you know, ethics and sustainability and safety and whatnot. and the tumblr post is saying that this is a critical part of theme parks, which I think is a little bit inaccurate, or at least enough to bother me, even if it isn’t wholly untrue. theme parks are, generally, always building new attractions, and safety and interest are all parts of what goes into them. advertising the biggest/the fastest is a part of that (and it can get you killed).

but you know who doesn’t have to do that? disneyland.

of course, disney the company wants to see marketing putting up advertisements and driving sales to the park and whatnot. but disneyland has too many guests. they don’t have to actually drive people to come here because their problem right now is they can’t stop people from coming!

so why would Jurassic World have to? people keep coming to see the dinosaurs, generation after generation, enough where they’re willing to pay X thousands of dollars per person PER DAY likely, to do so. at that point, just having dinosaurs really might be “enough” of an attraction. you don’t have to dig into it being a zoo or not a zoo (or nahtahzu), because it probably already succeeds financially at its most central directive, which is get paying customers in the door to see dinosaurs. 

I don’t think Jurassic Park(s) are quite a 1:1 to Disneyland, and when it comes to the storytelling, I can assure you that the limited plot construction makes zero nuanced understandings to theme parks; it’s just the conceit. But I do think it’s interesting that there is this IRL luxury ticket problem, and in my estimation Jurassic World has to be a luxury resort of a kind. I doubt they’re trucking in guests with $50 tickets just to get capacity up; the park couldn’t sustain those numbers.

On the other hand-- maybe this is completely the wrong way of looking at it! Disney also just rolled out the Halcyon galactic starcruiser vacation, which is the star wars immersive experience, and they pitch it akin to their cruise line packages. (From my recollection, it’s all-inclusive sans souvenirs.)

Aaaaaand it’s potentially flopping. It’s $1200 a night, per person. (Roughly.) It’s moderately popular, but the general consensus seems to be that the prices are too expensive to maintain full interest. And it’s not because it’s bad (though, god knows they also suffered from a lot of design cutbacks), it’s just fucking expensive. From observation, after the initial months, reservations seem to have opened up a lot. However! Disney is also hinting that they want to build one in Anaheim, which also could be that it’s popular enough with the wealthier crowd.

And then Disney also just went and did this:

The luxury market may be well and truly solid, and that wouldn’t surprise me, to be honest, since wealth inequality is greater than ever. (Interestingly, I feel like this offering from Disney strikes about right on par with my Jurassic World estimation-- it’s about $10,000 per “park”, or $5000 per day per person. Presumably including flights-- which I would assume the Isla Nublar ticketing would also.)

So! There’s two ways of looking at Jurassic World imo. I really do think they are a luxury vacation in all likelihood, and in that sense you are on a completely different playing field. People don’t buy $5000 gold-plated donuts because they like them, after all. And regardless of that, I don’t think you spend decades building and rebuilding dinosaur parks if they were 1) unpopular on their own, 2) people keep going despite the fact that people have died and the parks have imploded.

OR, and this is more in line with the original plot, it’s all capitalistic roulette. Maybe it’s so absurdly pricey that they can’t attract enough guests and they can’t feed the animals. Maybe they’re cutting corners on design to save money. It’s not impossible. But again, beyond the primary conceit-- it’s a theme park, and the attractions are inherently dangerous to the point of death, beyond mere injury-- the text doesn’t bear out much detail. (Again, I say, having not seen the newer ones.) So all we’re left with is a lot of talking around stuff, analytically.

On the other hand, there is this weird thing about theme parks: they already are inherently dangerous. The animatronics in pirates of the carribbean won’t bite your face off, but you can certainly get injured trying to climb out of the boats. And how much electronic/hydraulic force do you think is behind the motions in one single animatronic figure? Now multiply that to moving a false room that’s bigger than a literal boulder. I mean, hell. The yeti cracked its foundation, and now it’s turned off for esssentially ever. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous! That’s kind of the whole magic of it!

Theme parks and amusement parks and even carny rides are all about perceived risk. There is inherent thrill from walking that line between safety and danger. These are novel problems but they’re not unheard of. I don’t think dinosaurs would really be that much different. It really all comes down to execution, which is different than design (guess who cuts the checks).

Jurassic Park/World is weird, but in some ways I don’t think it’s unrealistic. It really is a matter of hitting the right or wrong market in the right or wrong ways. And where the movie flopped, out of a sense of lacking coherency or relevance or whatever-- I completely think the park could succeed, as an attraction, commercially and profitably. New custom dinosaurs or not.