Dubai in Don't-Buy Mode

Remember all of those grandiose plans to build a bunch of theme parks in the United Arab Emirates? Never mind. Amid the worldwide economic slump and falling oil prices, most of the park projects are on hold. Last week, Busch Entertainment Corp. said that its Dubai Worlds of Discovery resort is kaput for now. Announced with great fanfare around a year ago, Busch was set to build SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, an Aquatica water park, and a Discovery Cove swim-with-the-dolphins park on an audacious manmade island in the shape of Shamu, SeaWorld's signature killer whale. As with the other park projects, Middle East developers were going to bankroll and own Worlds of Discovery, while Busch was set to provide the creative concepts and its operations expertise.

There are conflicting reports about the fate of other high-profile Middle East park projects, a sampling of which includes Six Flags, Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and DreamWorks Animation. It's likely that some (most?) of them will never be more than an oil pipe dream. Hoping to rival Orlando as the world's theme park headquarters, breathless media releases from the UAE region in 2008 stated that $3 trillion (US dollars) worth of park and tourism projects was slated for development. The eye-popping stimulus package figures being debated in the US Congress notwithstanding, that number always seemed ludicrously overblown to me. Whatever the actual dollar amount, the sheer number of parks planned for the region seems unsustainable. In today's sobering economic climate, it would appear that UAE developers have reached the same conclusion.

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