UPDATE: Along with a new theme park for DreamWorks Animation, the studio has also announced at Comic Con 2012 that a “Penguins of Madagascar” movie is confirmed for 2015 and that they’re going ahead with “Kung Fu Panda 3”.
DreamWorks Animation has been longing to bring their popular animated characters to a theme park for a long time. After deals with China, Abu Dhabi and Dubai all failed, they’ve decided that the United States would be the perfect home for Shrek, the Madagascar clan and even Po the Panda. The studio has announced plan to become part of a on-hold mall project in the New Jersey Meadowlands now called “American Dream”.
U.S. theme parks are on the comeback trail lately because of Universal’s “Wizarding World of Harry Potter” and Disney’s “Cars Land”, so the timing is right for DreamWorks to get in on the action.
But this project has been in limbo for years. According to The New York Times, previous developers but ran out of money for what the mall that was originally called “Xanado”, and the lot has been vacant for three years. Now the new “American Dream” will have “nearly 1.7 million square feet of retail space, an indoor ski hill,
indoor sky diving, bowling, an aquarium, a live theater and the
14.7-acre amusement park.”
The total cost for this theme park: $1.75 billion (and $1.9B was already spent the first time). The Meadowlands area attracts 55 million people each year, so you’d think it’d be an ideal location for a theme park. But the N.Y. Giants and N.Y. Jets have sued the company behind this project (Triple Five), complaining that the construction will disrupted traffic getting to and from MetLife stadium, and they fear this will continue – since the park is not expected to open until September 2014. And then when it does, traffic jams on game days could be incredible.
But maybe Shrek will finally have a swamp home in the Meadowlands, and Alex and Marty aren’t too far away from their Central Park Zoo. It’s Po that’ll be most affected, having to move from China all the way to New Jersey. Though there are good chinese restaurants in NYC.