Goofyque'
Well-Known Member
Lots less of AK around in 1998 too. No Everest, No Kali, No Primeval Whirl, No Triceratops Spin, No Maharja jungle trek, No Newmo, No Y&Y... Apples and Oranges, just like building DL in a year.
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DHS Makeover - What we know so far.....
- Thread starter PhotoDave219
- Start date
Lots less of AK around in 1998 too. No Everest, No Kali, No Primeval Whirl, No Triceratops Spin, No Maharja jungle trek, No Newmo, No Y&Y... Apples and Oranges, just like building DL in a year.
ToTBellHop
Well-Known Member
LOL. It was a new theme park with three lands including Dinosaur and Kilimanjaro (and all the infrastructure that comes with building a new park). And it cost $800m. Now they can barely build 1 E-ticket for that.
Everest cost $100m in 2006 and would easily cost $200m now because of how things are managed. And it would still have a broken yeti.
ToTBellHop
Well-Known Member
I believe I mentioned that I understand inflation.
It is ASININE, SHOCKING, STUPID, APPALLING, and DISTURBING that AVATARland, with one E-ticket simulator, a C (Disney wants us to say D) ticket 5-minute boat ride, a quick-service, retail, and reused potties is on track to cost $1 billion. Even Jim Cameron would call that a blown budget.
And it got the head of WDI not demoted, but fired.
FigmentForver96
Well-Known Member
Yes and for comparison that DCA budget was what 1.7 billion. So they have already spent over half of that same amount of one land than an entire park makeover
its a D
I can't completely agree with the "Universal did better with less" line of reasoning. Part of the budget overrun on Pandora has to be due to the unique nature of this construction project. The floating mountains with built-in waterfalls, the unique features that will be in the environment of the land (glowing things and whatnot), the extensive rock mountain wall that will effectively hide the entire show building (not just part of it like Hogwarts) of two combined attractions. Yeah, Universal didn't spend that much on Diagon Alley, but it also contains nothing innovative in either the attraction(s) or the architecture. Crooked buildings, a coaster attraction that's similar in scope to the Mummy, and a train with TVs in it. It's hardly ground-breaking in a way that would inflate the money it cost to design and construct. A relatively "off-the-shelf" coaster and a train. Beautifully themed, of course, but not the kind of epic scope that would result in unexpected budget inflation. Basically the Mummy coaster with 3D projections and a short train ride, and some quirky-skinned polygonal buildings that are a few stories tall. The rides have a been-there, done-that kind of feel if you ignore the Pottery skinning. And not that I'm saying it's a bad thing, but budget-wise, I can understand why it was relatively cheap.
I'm not saying Disney is "efficient" with the money spent on this project, I'm just saying that comparing it to Diagon Alley on a budgetary scale is an iffy comparison. Diagon Alley is beautiful, and I'm sure it's even more effective on a Potter fan, but Pandora is going to have mountains with waterfalls floating over a hundred feet in the air, rivers, trees, glowing plants, and (possibly) some animatronic fauna and interactive (and/or glowing) walkways and other elements. I've never seen anything like that in a theme park. And the two attractions are of unknown final impact. The boat ride could be so beautiful that nobody will care that it might only be 5 minutes long, and Flights could be breathtaking. Might it be the first 60p digital, 3D, full-range motion simulator? I haven't been following much lately, but as far as I know, it could be. You can't really judge the efficiency of the final budget until you see the final product.
I'm not saying Disney is "efficient" with the money spent on this project, I'm just saying that comparing it to Diagon Alley on a budgetary scale is an iffy comparison. Diagon Alley is beautiful, and I'm sure it's even more effective on a Potter fan, but Pandora is going to have mountains with waterfalls floating over a hundred feet in the air, rivers, trees, glowing plants, and (possibly) some animatronic fauna and interactive (and/or glowing) walkways and other elements. I've never seen anything like that in a theme park. And the two attractions are of unknown final impact. The boat ride could be so beautiful that nobody will care that it might only be 5 minutes long, and Flights could be breathtaking. Might it be the first 60p digital, 3D, full-range motion simulator? I haven't been following much lately, but as far as I know, it could be. You can't really judge the efficiency of the final budget until you see the final product.
It wasn't really an entire park makeover. It was one land (Cars Land), a new restaurant (Carthay), and a re-skin of the entry street along with a trolley. (Although I'm not sure if World of Color was part of that overall 1.7B figure I've heard, or if it was the earlier 1.2B figure that didn't include it.). Aside from Cars Land, most of the changes were generally cosmetic things. It was a brilliant job, in my opinion, to fully re-brand that park, but even though Disney wants you to see it this way, you can't fairly call it an entire park makeover.
PizzaPlanet
Well-Known Member
Was the coaster going to be indoor or outdoor? Because I imagine an outdoor coaster looking a bit tacky in such a highly detailed area (dragon challenge).
Mike S
Well-Known Member
Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey was absolutely ground breaking and if I remember correctly it didn't even break $100 million by itself.
Something is seriously wrong with Disney's ability to spend efficiently.
FigmentForver96
Well-Known Member
Ok still avatar shouldn't cost what it has cost. It's at the point of being embarrassing
Yeah, I don't know the breakdown of Hogsmead/Hogwarts, but Universal did a lot with what they had. When it comes to just the attractions, they've done a great job, especially innovating a new ride system that was a fairly brilliant move of attaching Kuka arms to Spider-man vehicles.
But again, the scale of the lands they've built for Potter can't really compare to the scale/innovation architecturally for Pandora. Hogwarts was barely skinned with rocks (multiple parts of the show building are clearly visible from inside the land), and it was the only new attraction in that entire land, that was really just one street.
Again, I'm not suggesting that Universal isn't more efficient. I'm saying that Diagon Alley wasn't the best comparison, and that Pandora has some innovative architecture and incredibly large structural work that makes it almost pointless to try and compare it with Diagon Alley. Hogsmeade/Hogwarts might be slightly more apt, but still not direct enough in terms of size/scope.
Maybe, but how do we really know? Have you ever tried to price 140 foot high floating mountains with waterfalls? I don't think anyone ever has. We don't know how elaborate the landscaping is going to be or what the attractions and their queues will look like, so it's kind of hard to say at this point how egregious this budget is.
Are they probably spending a good chunk more than they "should"? Okay, maybe. Fair. But this kind of unprecedented architecture is bound to have costs that weren't anticipated. New Yankee Stadium, built in 2009, went $300M+ over its original $1B budget. That's 1.3B, and it doesn't have any rides at all. It happens in big projects sometimes. Sometimes it's the fault of construction management, but sometimes it's just unavoidable. Universal, again, aside from attaching Kuka arms to a Spider-Man vehicle, hasn't done anything technologically or architecturally innovative in either of its two Potter expansions, and that helps make stable, tight budgets a little easier to stick to. The biggest construction expenditure with Forbidden Journey ride (the indoor "ride" itself) was the addition of the Kuka arms. The sets and screens inside should cost peanuts, relatively speaking, as there's not a whole lot of scenery in there, and things like the giant spider don't even move. Most of the challenge of that attraction was the software, which, relatively speaking, costs peanuts compared to large-scale physical construction projects like 140ft floating mountains and waterfalls - stuff that the two Potter projects had none of.
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They're steel sticks with show dressing. Albeit big ones.
But this is the company who regularly builds mountains, geospheres on legs, an African Savannah and theme parks with basements. The runaway costs are an embarrassment at best. Potentially devastating at worse.
As those who've paid with their jobs know. The final cost is now heading to double the original budget. It's heading towards the cost of the park in 1998. For two rides in a pretty area.
This isn't some two bit fairground. It's the Walt Disney Company.
I defer some of this to you, because I know you know far more about the project than I do. But sometimes people get fired for stuff that isn't their fault, because "certain people" want to find a scapegoat when a under-estimated budget isn't met. And sometimes, when that happens, you only hear one side of the story.
Yankee Stadium is the same thing, isn't it? -- steel sticks with show dressing and lots of seats. And its footprint is probably much smaller than Pandora when you consider most of a baseball stadium's footprint is a large grass field. Yet Yankee Stadium cost upwards of 1.3B. Stadiums routinely cost 800M and up, and they never have e-ticket attractions and rarely have 140 foot high waterfalls.
And $100 in 1998 would cost you $145 in 2015, so it's a slightly loaded comparison. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=100&year1=1998&year2=2015
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FigmentForver96
Well-Known Member
This /\
I guess my point here is that one of three things happened, and I don't know how anyone can objective say for sure they know what it was. I don't care how many inside sources a person has, an executive is always looking to save face when an estimate isn't hit.
The way I see it, these are the basic scenarios:
1) The costs were grossly underestimated.
or
2) Construction was inefficient and/or poorly sourced.
or
3) It's nobody's fault and cost overruns happened because of impossible-to-predict obstacles in the rides, architecture, etc.
In a worst-case world, it's a tragic combination of all three, and that results in a project costing 2x what it was supposed to. In that event, it's really hard to fire every single person involved with the decision making. So what do you do? You start finding scapegoats, and those who are trying to save face try to put all the blame in 1 when it might have been 2, or 2 when it might have been 3, or ...
The way I see it, these are the basic scenarios:
1) The costs were grossly underestimated.
or
2) Construction was inefficient and/or poorly sourced.
or
3) It's nobody's fault and cost overruns happened because of impossible-to-predict obstacles in the rides, architecture, etc.
In a worst-case world, it's a tragic combination of all three, and that results in a project costing 2x what it was supposed to. In that event, it's really hard to fire every single person involved with the decision making. So what do you do? You start finding scapegoats, and those who are trying to save face try to put all the blame in 1 when it might have been 2, or 2 when it might have been 3, or ...
No, that's not an explanation as to why a budget might be double what it was estimated to be.
But that's what I'm saying. Who's accountable? Is it 1) or 2) from my reasons above? How do you know there isn't some 3 in there, also? How can you trust that there isn't a bunch of political reasons for why you may not be getting an objective and/or truthful answer? Is it poor choice of construction teams? Is it awful budgeting from the get-go? Is it people with an agenda pushing a budget that they knew was under-estimated? Is it Joe Rhode's expense account?