Shanghai's Disneyland, the first Disney park on the Chinese mainland, will feature scenes and characters from the blockbuster "Pirates of the movies". [Photo: CNTV]

Recently, the Walt Disney Co, a part-owner in Disney’s first theme park on China’s mainland, released details on two Shanghai Disneyland hotels, which hope to combine Chinese culture and Disney characters. A few weeks ago, as the construction of the US$5.4 billion Shanghai Disney theme park entered its last mile, the company opened its largest-in-the-world flagship store in Shanghai’s Pudong New Area.

Excitement is increasing with the theme park’s anticipated opening of in spring 2016. In the coming decade, theme parks will spread into large emerging economies. In this quest, Shanghai Disneyland will play a pivotal role.

Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse pioneered American theme park business in 1955 in Anaheim, California. But the industry’s roots originate from medieval church-sponsored fairs, 17th-century France and European pleasure gardens. Mechanical rides and fun houses came into the picture in the 1873 Vienna’s World Fair. By the 1920s, New York’s Coney Island thrived along with some 1,500 such parks in the US alone. What Walt Disney pioneered in the 1950s was a more family-oriented version of theme parks, which he first glimpsed in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens.

As Anaheim’s Disneyland was coupled with the ambitious Disney World in Orlando, Florida, large public companies began to invest in the industry. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck became big business. In the postwar era, the theme park industry was still mainly American. Since the 1980s, it has expanded in major advanced economies.

Today, there are some 30 major theme parks in the US and a slate of smaller ones, which generate more than US$15 billion a year from over 150 million visitors. Even before the global financial crisis, the industry generated US$25 billion in revenues from more than 550 million people across the world.

Today, the leading 25 parks globally attract some 225 million attendants annually. Among the major amusement/theme parks worldwide, Disney parks dominate nine spots on the top-10 list. Magic Kingdom in Florida, Tokyo Disneyland and Disney’s park in California are still at the top of the list.

Two of five of the world’s largest amusement/theme parks are already in Asia. The same goes for the largest water parks globally. But in emerging Asia, theme parks are relatively rare and the market is far from the saturation point.