The Year America’s Top 20 Stalled, Only Fandom Parks Grew — the Land Left Behind, and What a K-Culture Town Would Take
Above a drone shot of palm trees at sunset, the message reads:
"JOIN US FRIDAY & SATURDAY AS WE SAY GOODBYE."
That is the farewell notice on the homepage of Fiesta Village Family Fun Park, a 52-year-old fixture of California's Inland Empire that closes this weekend.
Jung Han
The same week, Disneyland Resort welcomed its one billionth guest, and Universal's new Orlando park kept pulling in crowds. The American theme park industry is splitting into two roads. Destination mega-resorts run by Disney and Universal keep getting bigger, while regional parks that cannot keep pace in the capital-intensive ride arms race are pushed out through closures and layoffs.
Behind the split are visitor numbers that never fully recovered after the pandemic, rising labor and operating costs, and the soaring price of new attractions as ride technology advances. Yet within this divide, the regional parks that survive share one trait: their draw is not hardware but fandom. Personality-driven IP, local identity, and repeat visitors from the surrounding community are carving out a third road.
The farewell notice on Fiesta Village's homepage. (Photo: Fiesta Village website capture)
California: A Goodbye After 52 Years
Fiesta Village opened in 1974 with mini golf, waterslides, and go-karts, later adding roller skating, laser tag, and a seasonal water park. Voted "best place for kids" in local readers' polls year after year since 2007, it became a neighborhood institution. Michelle O'Brien, who bought the park in 2002 and has run it since, cited rising operating costs and declining attendance. The park had reached "a point where there are no other options," she told the Los Angeles Times. The final public days are Friday, July 10, and Saturday, July 11. What happens to the property afterward has not been decided.
Fiesta Village sits directly off Interstate 10, with mini golf courses, outdoor seating areas, and water park facilities. (Photo: Fiesta Village)
Other California parks are shrinking too. Silicon Valley's California's Great America shortened its season and laid off 184 seasonal workers; unless its lease option is exercised before the mid-2028 expiration, its final season could come as early as 2027. Martin Lewison, a business management professor at Farmingdale State College in New York, told the Los Angeles Times he reads the cutbacks as a possible sign the park is being wound down. Maryland's Six Flags America ended operations last November, joining a long line of departures: Nashville's Opryland (1997), Houston's AstroWorld (2005), and Ohio's Geauga Lake (2007).
Disney Gets Bigger: The Numbers in Florida and Anaheim
The numbers on the other side point in the opposite direction. Disney drew 145 million visitors to its parks worldwide in 2024, holding the top operator spot. Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom led all parks globally for the 19th consecutive year with 17.84 million visitors, and Disneyland in Anaheim ranked second with 17.34 million.
This July, days before its 71st anniversary, the Anaheim park welcomed its cumulative one billionth guest. Disney's Experiences segment posted its first-ever $10 billion in annual operating income in fiscal 2025, and the company has budgeted roughly $9 billion in Experiences capital spending for fiscal 2026 — part of a $60 billion, ten-year plan.
Florida is the epicenter of this concentration. Comcast, Universal's parent, reported a 19% jump in quarterly theme park revenue on the strength of Epic Universe's opening in Orlando. Central Florida draws 75.3 million visitors a year, generating $59.9 billion in direct tourism spending. The mega-resorts keep growing in the same two states — Florida and California — where the regional parks are closing. The industry’s polarization is compressing geographically.
[Table 1] Top five global theme park operators by 2024 attendance. (Source: TEA Global Experience Index 2024)
The park-level league table sharpens the picture. Combined attendance at North America's top 20 parks came to 144 million in 2024, down 0.3% year over year. On that flat table, the top nine spots all belong to Disney and Universal, and eight of the nine sit in Florida or California. Disney kept every park in positive territory, while Universal wobbled in the year before Epic Universe opened: Universal Studios Hollywood fell 9.9% and Islands of Adventure 5.5%. Below tenth place the story splits. Identity-driven, season-pass regional parks posted the table's strongest growth: Knott's Berry Farm (+6.5%), Cedar Point (+5.0%), Kings Island (+5.0%), and Hersheypark (+3.0%).
[Table 2] North America's 20 most-visited theme parks, 2024. Combined top-20 attendance: 144 million, down 0.3% year over year. Note that No. 19, Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois, is a different park from California's Great America in Santa Clara. (Source: TEA/ECA/TPDB 2024)
Everyone Else Struggles: Six Flags After the Merger
The overall market is not shrinking. The U.S. amusement and theme park market is estimated at roughly $24.6 billion in 2025 and projected to grow around 3.5% annually to the $30 billion range by 2031 (Mordor Intelligence), and combined attendance at the world's top 25 parks rose 2.4% to about 246 million in 2024 (TEA).
The question is where that growth goes. Six Flags, which operates most of America's regional parks after its 2024 merger with Cedar Fair, drew 50.3 million visitors in 2024 by TEA's count — a third of Disney's total — and its fiscal 2025 results, reported in February, show the squeeze in full. Revenue came to $3.10 billion on 47.4 million visitors, with a net loss of $1.60 billion reflecting a $1.5 billion non-cash impairment of goodwill and other intangibles (adjusted EBITDA: $792 million).
John Reilly, who took over as CEO after Richard Zimmerman's departure, conceded in the earnings release that "2025 results fell short of our expectations" and named debt paydown and deleveraging the top priority. Net debt stood at $5.11 billion at year-end (total debt $5.20 billion), against $623 million in liquidity.
The company has formally put underperforming parks under review for sale, and by cutting winter holiday events at four parks it accepted a 13% fourth-quarter attendance drop (about 1.4 million visits) while lifting revenue per operating day 7%. Fourth-quarter per capita spending rose 8% to $66.41 — a scaled-down version of Disney's own prescription: hold the line on spending per guest rather than guest counts. Annual capital spending runs around $500 million; against Disney's $9 billion in a single year, the firepower gap runs a full order of magnitude.
Demand-side pressure compounds the problem. Even Disney reported a 1% decline in U.S. park attendance — the result of a sharp drop in international visitors amid tightened U.S. immigration and border controls. Its Anaheim park is filling the foreign-tourist gap with $71 tickets for local residents. Dennis Speigel, president of International Theme Park Services, told the Los Angeles Times he expects a flat year for the industry given economic uncertainty. Lewison points to the explosion of alternatives competing for consumers' time — video games, sports, live events — as another weight on regional parks.
The Way to Survive Is Fandom
Yet even among regional parks, results diverge. Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, California grew attendance 6.5% to 4.5 million in 2024, ranking tenth in the country. Tennessee's Dollywood entered North America's top 20 for the first time with 3.1 million visitors. What the two share is not a new-ride arms race but identity. Knott's leans on a century of berry-farm history and season-pass-driven local loyalty; Dollywood turns Dolly Parton's personal IP and Appalachian culture into the reason to visit. Rides have substitutes everywhere. Identity and fandom do not.
A children's ride at Fiesta Village. What a regional park sells is not the latest technology but neighborhood memories repeated across generations. (Photo: Fiesta Village)
The closing parks had fandom too. Jose Aguirre, a 23-year-old season pass holder at Great America, called the park "our Disneyland" in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. What disappears is not the demand but the vessel that holds it. Between destination resorts drawing 15-million-plus a year and the neighborhood parks now shutting down, a middle tier of one to four million annual visitors — the bracket where Knott's and Dollywood sit — is being hollowed out by the restructuring. The lesson of this wave of closures is that the battleground in that bracket has shifted from hardware to fandom.
The Land Left Behind
Restructuring also leaves land. A park property is priced not by the park but by the land's alternative use. Great America's 112 acres sold to logistics real estate firm Prologis for $310 million in 2022 — double the roughly $150 million Cedar Fair paid for the same ground in 2019. Six Flags America's 515-acre site is on the market through CBRE, pitched as a data center candidate. Until now, the ground where parks vanished has been filled by shopping malls, warehouses, and housing.
[Table 3] Major park properties coming to market through the restructuring. (Source: company disclosures and announcements; LA Times and local reports)
What Each Scale Buys: A Price Map for the Land
Operating parks provide the yardstick for what each footprint can do. Knott's Berry Farm handles 4.5 million visitors a year on a park footprint of roughly 57 acres; Dollywood draws 3.1 million on about 160. A middle-tier park, in other words, does not require a mega-site. Read the other way, a 10–20 acre Fiesta Village-type property can support a permanent experience zone, outdoor events, and small-venue performances at a scale of several hundred thousand visitors a year, while a 100-acre-class site can carry an arena, studios, and lodging — a destination facility above one million annual visitors.
The price map starts from actual transactions. The upper bound is Silicon Valley: 112 acres for $310 million, or roughly $2.8 million per acre. Commercial land in the Inland Empire runs far below that, and small metros in the South and Midwest lower still. On large East Coast tracts, data center demand is the variable pushing prices up. The figures below are estimated ranges based on disclosed deals and regional comparables; ownership structures and zoning conditions will move them site by site.
[Table 4] What each scale supports, with estimated land costs. Ranges are anchored to operating-park results (Knott's ~57 acres/4.5M; Dollywood ~160 acres/3.1M) and disclosed transactions; site-level due diligence will move them.
Outlook: A Flat Year on the Surface, Faster Redistribution Beneath
The baseline for this year is the flat year Speigel projects. Beneath the flat total, however, redistribution is likely to accelerate. Three variables matter. First, Six Flags' portfolio pruning: with the sale of underperforming parks now formally on the table, more parks and more land will come to market, and the decision on Great America's lease extension (expiring mid-2028) will be made within the next year. Second, competing uses for the land: as the marketing of Six Flags America's acreage as a data center site shows, AI infrastructure demand has become the strongest rival bidder for park properties. Anyone weighing an experiential conversion needs to move before data centers and logistics push prices out of reach.
Third, new entrants in the experience economy. Netflix opened its first two Netflix House venues late last year — more than 100,000 square feet each, at King of Prussia near Philadelphia and Galleria Dallas — with a third planned for BLVD Las Vegas on the Strip in 2027. The model runs on immersive IP experiences, food, and merchandise rather than rides, and one of its anchor properties is Squid Game. Korean IP, in other words, is already anchoring American experiential venues. Who claims the hollowing middle tier between the mega-resorts (Disney, Universal) and the mall-based IP houses (Netflix) is the question that will define the next two to three years of the U.S. experience economy.
One Alternative: A K-Culture Town, on the Fandom Road
If fandom is the battleground, it is natural that the content with the world's most organized fandom appears on the list of alternatives for these properties: the K-Culture Town / K-pop Hub scenario. The logic starts with not replaying the game the regional parks lost. Inherit the hardware the old parks leave behind — parking, power, indoor facilities, entertainment-use permits — and build the reason to visit out of software: regular K-pop performances and fan events, dance studios, photo zones, drama-set experiences, a K-food zone, and studios for short-form vertical dramas aimed at the U.S. market. Dollywood, drawing 3.1 million a year on personal IP and regional identity, is the proof of concept — and Netflix House putting Squid Game at the front of its lineup shows that on-site demand for Korean IP is already being validated. Linked to K-Screen Tour products that convert visits into travel to Korea, such a hub could serve a dual function: a gathering place for the American fandom and a gateway to Korea.
[Table 5] A phased entry model for a K-Culture Town / K-pop Hub. Investment figures are estimates based on disclosed transactions; individual sites require due diligence.
The conditions are fairly clear. Location: within about an hour's drive of a major metro where K-pop and K-drama fandom concentrates — Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Washington D.C. — with direct highway access, ample parking, local government incentives, and proximity to an international airport. Structure: a three-way partnership between a local government contributing land and incentives, Korean entertainment companies and studios licensing IP, and an operator handling the business and tourism linkage.
Osceola County, Florida — which recruited Korean entertainment-tech firms to its NeoCity district — offers the government-led template. The caveats are equally clear: relying only on the local demand that failed the previous park repeats its mistake, so the demand base must be designed around the metro region and the national fandom; and without licensed artist or drama IP, a merely "Korean-styled" space gives few reasons to visit.
NeoCity in Osceola County, Florida: a government-led development with a 200MW substation, 500-plus pad-ready acres, Class A office space, and a STEM high school (NeoCity Academy). (Photo: Osceola County / NeoCity)
On America's two diverging theme park roads, the third road has always been cut by fandom. What will fill the ground the regional parks leave behind has not been decided — but the numbers from this wave of closures suggest the first claim belongs to content that brings its fandom with it.
Sources: Los Angeles Times (Wendy Lee, Sept. 12, 2025; Cerys Davies, July 7, 2026); Disneyland Resort official announcements; TEA Global Experience Index 2024; Mordor Intelligence; Six Flags (including FY2025 results), Disney, and Comcast disclosures; Netflix announcements; Fiesta Village official statements. Investment figures are estimates based on disclosed transactions and require site-specific due diligence.