Exploring the Empowerment of Children's Theater in Amusement Parks: Constructing a New Model for Parent-Child Leisure Scenarios
time2024/12/13
- Children's theater in parks boosts family leisure, shifting from traditional to interactive shows. It faces high costs and IP issues, prompting a venue-sharing model to cut expenses and enhance the experience. Pioneers like Jegoplay are setting new family entertainment standards.
When it comes to amusement park entertainment projects, people often think of Disney's Fantasmic! night show, the Golden Fairy Tale Festival, the Mickey's Storybook Express parade... As leading brands in the industry, the experience of large theme parks like Disney and Universal Studios in developing entertainment projects has essentially established the current model for the development of amusement park entertainment products. Entertainment products centered around IPs, such as themed shows and parades, have become standard offerings in large theme parks.
However, such large-scale entertainment projects have strict requirements for IPs, venues, facilities, performing teams, and management experience, with high development costs. Moreover, the homogenization of amusement park entertainment projects gradually reduces the chances of products standing out and shining. For most parent-child amusement parks with limited investment, space, and IPs, these entertainment products are not suitable. What kind of entertainment forms can parent-child amusement parks, which mainly cater to families, leverage to carve out a development path distinct from the entertainment project creation models of large theme parks, enhance visitor experience added value, and build the park's soft competitive edge?
The focus is still on the consumption trends of the main customer group in the amusement park - parent-child families in the entertainment market. From the perspective of the entertainment market, parent-child family consumption is impressive. According to relevant data from the "2022 China Performance Market Annual Report," the box office revenue from children's theater performances throughout 2022 was 734 million yuan, with an average ticket price of 183 yuan. During popular periods in the performance market such as the summer vacation and the National Day holiday in 2022, the box office share of children's theater performances reached more than 30%. It is evident that children's theater performances are gradually becoming a new choice for urban families to "take their children out."
Unlike other types of drama, children's theater is a collective term for various types of plays, including spoken drama, opera, ballet, musicals, traditional Chinese opera, fairy tales, mythology, puppet shows, and shadow plays, all specifically designed for children. In addition to having the characteristics of general drama types, children's theater must also cater to the unique interests, psychological states, and ways of understanding and thinking about things that are characteristic of children.
In addition to traditional forms of children's entertainment such as musicals, spoken dramas, and dance dramas, in recent years, the popularity of niche genres such as interactive science dramas, immersive physical theater, multimedia installation plays, puppetry, suitcase theater, and magic shows has also been on the rise. In the 2022 national performance market's top 5 box office rankings for children's theater, the "Flying Cotton Candy Environmental Series of Parent-Child Drama," which mainly features immersive niche emerging plays, ranked third, just behind the Ultraman Legend series of stage plays and the Canadian interactive parent-child show "You Are the Musician," two imported shows. It is evident that small-scale, high-quality, and more immersive niche plays are also favored by today's parents and children.
Amusement parks and children's theater are both popular choices for parent-child family leisure and entertainment, and there have long been precedents for parks integrating and creating original children's theater performance projects. For example, industry leader Disney has created original children's theater performances centered around its own film and television IP resources, such as "Mickey's PhilharMagic," "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Adventure of Jack Sparrow," and "Frozen: A Musical Spectacular"; and Xiangyang Huaqiao City's QiQu Childhood Parent-Child Park has created the original IP play "Let's Go, Doctor," which are typical examples of parks independently producing children's theater performance projects. In terms of the genre's characteristics, they are mostly traditional forms of performance such as musicals, musical dance dramas, and musical dance shows.
As with other entertainment projects, parent-child amusement parks also face the same challenges when creating their own children's theater performance products, namely the limitations posed by factors such as IPs, venue space, hardware facilities, performing teams, and management experience.
Additionally, the choice of drama genre will also affect the product development costs. Among children's theater, genres such as children's musicals and children's dance dramas have higher requirements for stage, hardware facilities, and performing teams compared to children's puppet shows, children's suitcase theater, children's installation theater, and parent-child magic shows. Therefore, for parent-child amusement parks with limited investment scale, independently creating children's theater performance projects is no longer an optimal choice. Leveraging the space and traffic advantages of the parent-child amusement park, using the park as a platform, selecting lightweight children's niche plays for cooperation and co-construction, and jointly launching distinctive children's theater performance products to create new scenes for parent-child leisure and new spaces for parent-child performances is a better option.
In this model, the amusement park provides venue space and a customer base, which reduces the ticketing pressure and venue rental costs for the performance company; the performance company provides mature entertainment content, lowering the park's investment costs and enhancing the park's attractiveness and experience through lightweight entertainment formats.
Of course, to establish such a cooperative model, the amusement park and the performance company need to meet the following three basic conditions:
1. The amusement park must have reasonable planning and construction as well as outstanding operational benefits, providing a reasonable space and a certain volume of customer traffic, which lays the foundation for reducing the performance company's ticketing pressure and venue rental costs.
2. In terms of selecting cooperative plays, it is preferred to choose niche emerging plays with a certain market reputation, low requirements for venue and stage design, and fewer performing personnel, in order to reduce the park's investment costs in space and operations. For example, "suitcase musicals" that can be placed in suitcases require no venue construction, no lighting or stage design; they can be performed immediately upon opening the suitcase, greatly reducing investment and time costs.
3. As the content provider of the performance, the performance company itself must have mature performance products to provide strong content support for the amusement park, increasing the richness of the park's entertainment offerings and the value of visitors' experience.
Whether this model can be established ultimately requires more practical proof. However, it cannot be denied that this kind of parent-child amusement park performance project demands higher standards for the park's planning, design, construction, and operation. The park needs to have a strong traffic foundation to generate the interest of performance companies in cooperation and residency.
Jegoplay has currently established and operates two Jegoplay TOO Parent-Child Amusement Parks in Shanghai, with each park attracting an average of 700,000 visitors per year. The extremely high popularity and traffic are the result of Jegoplay's integrated operational model, which includes planning consultation, design planning, and investment operation. Now, Jegoplay is also using platformization as a lever to actively explore and construct a path for creating theme performance products with the characteristics of Jegoplay Parent-Child Amusement Parks. This enables the park and lightweight performance forms to empower each other, jointly creating a new space for park performances and a new model for the development of parent-child leisure scenes.