I think the lack of meaningful investment post-Swarm, and particularly post-DBGT, is quite a complex and multi-faceted issue. My view is that it was caused by both Thorpe-specific factors and factors of the wider Merlin group that Thorpe were simply affected by.
I think it did start with The Swarm’s “failure” in 2012, when attendance was down by over 10% on the previous year. Some might argue that this failure was more multi-faceted than simply the ride itself; 2012 was the wettest summer in decades, and events like the Diamond Jubilee and London 2012 diverted attention away from the parks. It was a weak year for attendance across the board, with Alton Towers’ attendance also dropping by around 10% and that of many other parks across Europe also being drastically lower in 2012. Not to mention that 2009-2011 were absolute peak attendance years for Thorpe Park, and the attendance likely couldn’t have gone an awful lot higher. Regardless, the inability to raise attendance saw Swarm deemed a “failure”, which in turn caused the park to do a drastic u-turn on the hefty “thrills, thrills, thrills” positioning of the prior few years.
I’m led to believe that another big coaster was originally planned for 2015/2016, on the island next to Swarm, but this was scrapped in favour of Derren Brown’s Ghost Train after Swarm “failed”, as it was felt that the park needed to try something different after Swarm’s “failure”.
Of course, this ultimately didn’t work, as DBGT is also widely perceived to have “failed” despite the fact that it did ever-so-slightly raise attendance (albeit not significantly by any stretch). It was delayed by 2 months and didn’t open until July, it was horrendously unreliable, and its reception was mixed to negative at best. After a few months of operation, it was so unreliable and received so poorly that it had to have a pretty significant overhaul for the 2017 season, and even that didn’t seem to particularly save it. At one stage, it’s alleged that John Wardley was even asked to come in and save it, but he refused. Taking into account that DBGT was reportedly the most expensive theme park attraction ever built in the UK, I think it’s fair to say that the ride was not a resounding success by any metric.
After DBGT, I’m led to believe that the park was planning a major attraction for 2020. Indeed, the park hinted towards a 2020 coaster of some form at an Attraction Source event back in July 2017. However, later that year, Nick Varney announced wide-ranging CAPEX cuts across the Resort Theme Park estate, which this 2020 Thorpe project is believed to have fallen victim to. Given that Swarm and DBGT both “failed”, I wouldn’t mind betting that another major investment into Thorpe would have been high on the list of things to cut.
In general, I think Thorpe was seen as a poisoned chalice for a number of years after both Swarm and DBGT failed, but I’d also wager that there were projects planned at some stage that fell victim to Merlin’s wider CAPEX cuts in the late 2010s. There was nothing major in the pipeline at any of the RTPs post-Wicker Man until after the company went private again; you used to get a major new ride investment at a Merlin RTP every year, but we got none at all between Wicker Man in 2018 and Jumanji at Gardaland in 2022. This wouldn’t have been caused by COVID, either, as major projects planned for 2020 and 2021 would have been signed off before COVID.
