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London Entertainment Resort: All Discussion

jon81uk said:
But prior to the merger the only UK theme park they operated was Legoland, Merlin only had Dungeons and Sea life really. If anything it was Tussauds that dominated the UK theme parks anyway without the merger. Yes Legoland was competition but it’s a different style of park compared to the others so people chose it over Chessington due to the Lego brand. Best would probably be if Lego wanted to take back direct control of the Legoland parks.
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Going from running one of the top attended parks to 4 in one transaction was a huge game changer.

Tussauds built up their ownership over a number of years, although there is an argument to say they perhaps should not have been able to buy Thorpe Park.

Anyway what’s happened has happened. Doesn’t stop the authorities investigating the market now, but I accept there is little to no political interest in doing so.
 
I know very little about these things but I'd guess that the competitions and markets authority are less concerned with luxury items or experiences than they are for example travel and everyday items that people need to live. I don't really know though.
 
AT86 said:
The best solution in my view for the UK market is to break up the monopoly that Merlin have.

There is no need (or even consumer demand) to build parks from scratch like the London Resort, spending billions and needing to attract over 10 million guests to get any return on investment. Time and money would be better spent investing in the parks that already exist.

In my opinion Merlin should never have been allowed to purchase Tussauds without having to sell off one of the south east parks as part of the deal.

The authorities have stepped in on many occasions in the past to break up companies who have too much control over a market, the one that comes to mind is the ownership of Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, they once were part of the same group but now have three different owners as it was deemed they had too much control over the market in the south east.

Having the top 4 parks in the UK owned by the same group is the dominant issue for most of the problems we see in the market.

If that could be addressed it would go a long way to shaking things up and wouldn’t require the waste of time and money over 10 years about the London resort.
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It won’t happen because on paper they don’t have a monopoly. The commission doesn’t care about whether you have 4 of the best of something, just whether you have an overall monopoly.

The airports was because they where all London airports, if the company had 4 airports spread across the entire country they would not have been forced to split.
 
And Merlin own three of the three parks in the south east in very close proximity to each other. If they were spread around the country maybe it wouldn’t be as much of an issue.

I say again that I don’t expect there to suddenly be an investigation in to the market. But believe the ownership structure to be a considerate driver of the frustrations many have for the issues within the parks.
 
I agree with some that there is a gap in the market, possibly near London, for a newly built theme park to help compete, but a project of this huge size and massive cost was never going to be it. I think it's pretty clear that parks that start smaller but grow larger as there brands grows do better. This project was never going to work for so many reasons. If they wanted a smaller park with a much lower investment and much less impact on the locals I think they may well have had a chance.
 
AT86 said:
Going from running one of the top attended parks to 4 in one transaction was a huge game changer.

Tussauds built up their ownership over a number of years, although there is an argument to say they perhaps should not have been able to buy Thorpe Park.

Anyway what’s happened has happened. Doesn’t stop the authorities investigating the market now, but I accept there is little to no political interest in doing so.
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But Tussauds was really the bigger player, it wasn’t Merlin so much taking over as a merger and keeping the Merlin name. It’s not Merlin going from one theme park to three, it’s Tussauds going from operating the biggest attractions in the UK to part of a company operating more of the biggest attractions in the UK. Tussauds taking on Alton Towers in 1991 both made the park what it was and also created a company operating pretty much all of the largest attractions in the UK at the time. Already before the merger the Tussauds annual pass was a great deal.
 
Thameslink Rail said:
The zombie continues
Do they even have any money or assets to pay Paramount off with?
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Top tip - use archive.ph for paywalled articles as it's impossible to read for most otherwise. Alternatively, give a summary of the story as it helps properly progress discussion :)

In short - no, they probably have very little money. However, considering the CVA deal means that Paramount get nothing if the project doesn't come to fruition (which it won't) they're jumping in whilst there's the possibility something to pay out.
 
Nearly £100m in debt? On what exactly?

They haven't even put a spade in the ground in over a decade. What could they possibly have spent that money on? Planning documents, legal fees and wages surely wouldn't have gone anywhere near that amount?
Somebody has pocketed a lot of money it sounds like it to me.
 
Benjsh said:
Nearly £100m in debt? On what exactly?

They haven't even put a spade in the ground in over a decade. What could they possibly have spent that money on? Planning documents, legal fees and wages surely wouldn't have gone anywhere near that amount?
Somebody has pocketed a lot of money it sounds like it to me.
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IP rights, will be a significant part of what they've spent. At one point in time they had deals with BBC, ITV, Paramount and a quite a few others.

Blackpool paid ~£10 million for Nickelodeon Land alone, from the then Viacom (owners of Paramount). Spread similar costs around multiple IP owners and the money quickly tots up, even if you never used them, depending on how badly the deals were organised.

You'll have the cost of the site too, which isn't a small patch of land.

The project will have been funded from private investment, those investors will now want their money back as there isn't anything to show for it. Those initial loans would have been made over 10 years now, so you'll have to add on at least a decade's worth of interest.

All of this, of course, without any actual income. That's why they're in debt. It's not about how much is in their bank account, it's how much they owe their lenders.

You can have £200 million in your account. You can have borrowed £100 million. You can never have spent a penny. You will still be £100 million in debt.
 
All the preliminary assessments will have added up. A feasibility study. Risk assessments. Environmental assessments, Obtaining IP rights. Blue sky ideation. Concept design (although I suspect it never actually found its firm footing to this phase). Raising funds in the first place. These things cost millions before you put a shovel into the ground.

The pitch deck alone for this thing will have been hundreds and hundreds of pages pooling from a huge wealth of costly resources. Whilst I have absolute confidence money from this has been slid into questionable locations, or figures obscenely misconstrued, I'm also confident the figure will have easily neared the £100m mark for a project of this scope already.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
IP rights, will be a significant part of what they've spent. At one point in time they had deals with BBC, ITV, Paramount and a quite a few others.

Blackpool paid ~£10 million for Nickelodeon Land alone, from the then Viacom (owners of Paramount). Spread similar costs around multiple IP owners and the money quickly tots up, even if you never used them, depending on how badly the deals were organised.

You'll have the cost of the site too, which isn't a small patch of land.

The project will have been funded from private investment, those investors will now want their money back as there isn't anything to show for it. Those initial loans would have been made over 10 years now, so you'll have to add on at least a decade's worth of interest.

All of this, of course, without any actual income. That's why they're in debt. It's not about how much is in their bank account, it's how much they owe their lenders.

You can have £200 million in your account. You can have borrowed £100 million. You can never have spent a penny. You will still be £100 million in debt.
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Surely anything they have paid out in IP rights will be minimal given they still didn't have the greenlight for the actual construction to begin. Surely they weren't that stupid but in saying that they probably were knowing how this has gone.

As for the land......I wouldn't confess to know if they purchased it outright or was the agreement for the land subject to the greenlight for the project.

Lots of questions and sadly we might never know the full details. It's a hell of a lot of money though to be in debt though. I suspect somebody somewhere has pocketed a nice bit of loot.
 
Benjsh said:
As for the land......I wouldn't confess to know if they purchased it outright or was the agreement for the land subject to the greenlight for the project.
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Don’t quote me on this, but I seem to remember hearing that the arrangement for the land was agreements with the current owners without actually purchasing. Think something along the lines of “we’re going to purchase it in the future, but we’re not going to do it now”.

At this point, I’ll admit to being very surprised that it’s still going. From where I’m standing, things do not look good for the project and haven’t for some time now…

It’s such a shame; back in 2020, when they were doing the planning permission and the public consultations, things arguably looked a bit more promising and the project did at least seem to have a bit of momentum behind it…
 
rob666 said:
Why are we still debating this dead duck?
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I think it's safe to say pretty much everyone doesn't see it happening, that debate finished long ago.

But, at the same time it's very interesting seeing what the actual end game is going to end up being, and the news of the legal case is part of that. If one doesn't see the value in debating the demise of said dead duck then that's fine, but others may wish to.
 
Craig said:
I think it's safe to say pretty much everyone doesn't see it happening, that debate finished long ago.

But, at the same time it's very interesting seeing what the actual end game is going to end up being, and the news of the legal case is part of that. If one doesn't see the value in debating the demise of said dead duck then that's fine, but others may wish to.
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Exactly, yes it's basically dead but the fallout from that is only just beginning and could be interesting.
 
I don't know if I'm the only one who thinks this but I've a feeling that a Disney/Universal style resort in a massive overpopulated and touristic city like London would be quite successful. Thorpe and Chessington gets quite crowdy and they are medium-sized parks and not that famous at all (like nobody knows Thorpe here in Spain if I ask around but everybody knows Disneyland Paris)

A resort in London based on IPs and promoted as one of the main touristic attractions in the city is some serious bussiness I think.
 
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