Room seen for Disney, Wanda on mainland

Walt Disney Co will have Mickey Mouse and all its entertainment and marketing assets in China when the American amusement pioneer opens its $5.5-billion Shanghai Disney Resort next month. But Wang Jianlin won't be there with a "Welcome" sign.

"Disney really shouldn't have come to China," the billionaire chairman of Chinese property and entertainment giant Dalian Wanda Group Co, said last week on state television. "It's financial prospects don't look so good to me."

Wang said that for Disney to build its 963-acre park outdoors in Shanghai where summers are rainy and winters are cold showed the company's lack of innovative thinking.

But analysts say the Chinese market is probably big enough for both companies and that each will likely find an audience sector to dominate.

"The main thing to remember is that competing theme parks are not a cage match to the death where one reigns supreme and the other goes out of business due to inferiority," said Josh Young, a theme park industry analyst and editor-in-chief of Theme Park University, a website that analyzes theme parks.

On May 28, Wanda and its billionaire founder Wang inaugurated a sprawling entertainment complex in the city of Nanchang, which is also the capital of Jiangxi province. Wanda's 20 billion-yuan ($3 billion) site has an outdoor theme park, 10 hotels and tea-cup-shaped buildings that will house a shopping mall, cinemas, restaurants, a film park and the world's largest ocean park.

Noting that his park would debut just three weeks before the scheduled June 16 opening of Disney's park in Shanghai, Wang said he plans to "overtake Disney" as the biggest global tourism company by 2020.

"The frenzy of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and the era of blindly following them have passed," said Wang. Disney is "entirely cloning previous intellectual properties, cloning previous products, with no more innovation."

Disney said in an e-mailed reply to The Associated Press that Wang's comments were "not worthy of a response."

Wanda intends to open 15 to 20 smaller theme parks in China over the next several years. And in a bid to emulate Disney's movie-making capabilities, Wanda reached a $3.5-billion deal earlier this year to acquire US-based Legendary Entertainment, a film production company behind The Dark Knight, and Jurassic World movies.

Elliott Weiss, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business who has written a case study of Disney's Shanghai park, said the Disney brand is strong enough to triumph in China.

paulwelitzkin@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily USA 05/30/2016 page1)