SEOUL, KOREA - A large-scale theme park, coupled with a casino and a golf course, will be set up in a 2.8-million-square-meter site in Changwon, near Busan in the southeast.

 

The South Gyeongsang Provincial Government signed on July 16 an agreement with Fox Consumer Products, the marketing and licensing arm of 20th Century Fox, and Village Roadshow Theme Parks Ltd. of Australia to jointly develop the Jinhae Global Theme Park. At the cost of US$3.5 billion, the partners plan to open the park by the second half of 2018.

 

 

 

The park will encompass a six-star hotel, a casino, a waterpark, a movie theater, premium outlet, and an 18-hole golf course, as well as the movie-themed park. The 300,000-square-meter movie-themed park, the centerpiece of the project, will feature more than 25 rides and attractions with characters and story lines from 20th Century Fox's films, including "The X-Men," "Ice Age," "Titanic," and "Alien vs. Predator."

 

The provincial government expected that the park would have an economic effect in excess of 5 trillion won, with 10 million tourists a year and more than 10,000 jobs created by the establishment. Given there are more than 60 cities with a population in excess of 1 million within the 3-hour flight distance from Gimhae International Airport, the government plans to attract tourists actively.

 

Although several major movie distributors such as Universal Studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, and Paramount Pictures have tried to build a theme park in Korea, they failed because of obstacles such as excessively high land prices. The provincial government will create a special-purpose corporation by the year's end and begin to work on the theme park project from the next year. In December last year, 20th Century Fox announced its plans to break ground on a 101,000-square-meter theme park in Malaysia.