MANMOHAN SHETTY IS EASILY bored. But 110 acres of roller coasters, 44 metre pendulum swing rides, tugs, carousels, spins, flight simulators, undersea rides, and more at his new playground, Adlabs Imagica, ought to take care of any monotony. The screaming of adrenaline junkies will keep the cash registers ringing and may even keep Shetty occupied for a while. This is the man who brought IMAX theatres to India, and after setting up two, got bored. “After my second multiplex, I was not interested any more. The next one could only have better seats, better food, etc. I had picked up the best for the first one itself, what more could I do?” he says.

His critics say that Shetty has the attention span of a child, but also admit that it’s this childlike ability to see possibilities that adults miss and take big risks that have made him what he is today—a migrant from Mangalore, Karnataka, who started as a lab assistant processing films in Mumbai to a Bollywood A-list film producer who became a multiplex owner, and is now thinking like Walt Disney.

In the late 1970s, when he began running his own film processing lab, Adlabs, Shetty built a successful business by focussing more on advertising films than the more obvious, movies, for example. His vision for his theme park is huge. When Imagica is completed in 2014—a water park and a 300-room resort are slotted for phase two—Shetty’s company, now called Adlabs Entertainment, would have put in Rs 1,650 crore, the largest investment in the entertainment business in one go. Shetty would have stumped up Rs 550 crore of his own money as equity, while the remainder would be debt. The other large investment in a similar project was back in 1989, when Subhash Chandra’s Essel group built EsselWorld, an amusement park near Mumbai, for Rs 60 crore. Even after adjusting for inflation, Shetty is splurging five times more. For that kind of money, he could have built a 300 megawatt power station and lit up 600 small to midsize homes.

[Left] Aarti Shetty, Adlabs creative director, and Pooja Shetty Deora, Joint MD. Image: Ronjoy Gogoi
[Left] Aarti Shetty, Adlabs creative director, and Pooja Shetty Deora, Joint MD. Image: Ronjoy Gogoi

For the past year or so, Shetty has been heading out to the Imagica site at least three days a week in his Range Rover at 8 am to beat the worst of the Mumbai traffic. The park is situated off the Khopoli exit on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, and is roughly a 90-minute drive from the city centre. He is usually joined by Renato Franceschelli, director of Attractions International, a Hong Kong-based company that offers specialised design services to the theme park and entertainment industry, hired to create the master plan for Imagica. Franceschelli is an industry veteran who has worked on various Disney and Universal Studios Hollywood parks in the last 25 years and has been associated with Shetty’s project since 2009. The duo is usually the first in and the last out of the park. Shetty is interested in the big picture, the rides, and even all the little details. “He knows about the kind of cement being used, how the rocks have been cut, the level of the water in the reservoir, how many trees have been bought, everything,” says Franceschelli.

At his Mumbai office, Shetty talks proudly of the Nitro, billed as one of Asia’s largest roller coasters. “That one ride cost us Rs 80 crore and it will take about three months to install,” he says. Competition has taken notice. Arun Chittilappilly, who heads Wonder La, a chain of amusement parks in Bangalore and Kochi, says, “There are no [other] full-fledged roller coasters in India. A full-fledged roller coaster can cost $10 million (Rs 54.5 crore) to $15 million, which is often half the cost of building an amusement park.” Built by Bolliger & Mabillard, a Swiss roller coaster engineering design consultancy that has supplied 85 coasters to major theme parks across the world, Nitro will be spread across three and a half acres.

“This is the scream zone,” says Pooja Shetty Deora, Shetty’s elder daughter and joint managing director of Adlabs Entertainment. She is showing us around the park, which is scheduled to open by March end. It’s currently a huge, dusty field, overrun by gigantic cranes, excavators, moving parts of various rides covered in tarp and hundreds of workers in hard hats. “There’s Gold Rush, the family coaster set around a gold mine, the drop ride, the Scream Machine, which is a pendulum swing ride that rises 44 metres on each side, and then there’s the Nitro,” she adds, pointing to the huge concrete pillars that will support the ride. In the middle of all that is Red Bonnet, an American diner where customers will be served from a ’60s-era red Cadillac accompanied by rock and roll music.

A smaller roller coaster, built by Baltimore-based Premier Rides, is set in the dark. It launches at a very high speed, and takes visitors on a virtual ride through space. “It has never been done in a dark setting before,” says Franceschelli. And then there is I for India, a flight simulator attraction, based on Disneyland’s hugely popular Soarin’ Over California; for this one, the team had to get permission from the Ministry of Defence to shoot footage from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

Franceschelli says theme parks are all about combining a larger theme with “fun and adrenaline”. Imagica is built around the theme of a journey across the world. Hence, the five zones: the Americas, Europe, West Asia, Africa, and India. In the West Asian theme, for instance, visitors can take the Ali Baba ride, where their mission is to shoot thieves who are after the king’s treasure. “It’s like being inside a video game,” says Shetty’s younger daughter Aarti Shetty, who, as creative director, heads the five-member core team that planned the storylines, and wrote the scripts and dialogues for each theme.

Unlike Disney or Universal Studios, where the theme parks are often extensions of powerful franchises (from Mickey Mouse to Jaws), Imagica is built mostly around original content with a bit of Bollywood thrown in (there’s a ride around Mr. India, a popular Hindi film). This is both a challenge (the idea should be powerful enough to draw people) as well as an opportunity. The new ideas could ultimately become movies, serials, animations, etc.—a bit like Pirates of the Caribbean, which first started as an attraction at Disneyland in 1967 before it became a hit movie series. At IMAX, Shetty had to create the hardware (theatre infrastructure), but ultimately its success was driven by the quality of third party software (movies) that were screened there. Here, he is responsible for both.

IT ALL STARTED five years ago, when Aarti Shetty was asked to suggest theme parks that her father could visit. It was November 2007, and Manmohan Shetty had just stepped down as CEO at Adlabs Films (renamed Reliance MediaWorks after it was sold in 2005 to ADAG or Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group). Thinking her father wanted a break, Aarti Shetty suggested they go to Las Vegas and take in some shows as well. But Shetty insisted on visiting theme parks across the U.S.—he even mentioned Hong Kong. That’s when the penny dropped. “This was no holiday,” recalls Aarti Shetty. Her father was about to chase another of his dreams—this time a 25-year-old one.
Shetty had first visited the Disneyland and Universal Studios Hollywood theme parks in 1982; he was so impressed with the parks that he wanted to set up one back home. But he also realised that this was a venture that would take huge amounts of time and money—neither of which he had to spare then. But the trip had shown him other possibilities; he also visited an IMAX theatre for the first time.

In 2001, along with Deora, he built India’s first IMAX dome theatre in Mumbai, foraying into the film exhibition business with a four-screen multiplex. By then Shetty had already turned movie producer. “I saw that the high-end crowd did not go to cinema halls. I didn’t go either, at least not with my family. It wasn’t my kind of a place. If there was something better, I would’ve gone,” he says, explaining the opportunity he’d spotted. But after selling off to Reliance, he had both the time and the money—and the dream of building a world-class park styled on Disneyland and Universal Studios was still attractive. For the record, he took the idea first to Reliance, but they turned it down.

He is very clear that Imagica is the country’s first theme park. “We have amusement parks here, but no theme parks,” he says, referring to the existing entertainment parks in India, such as EsselWorld in Mumbai, Ramoji’s Film City in Hyderabad, Wonder La in Bangalore and Kochi, and the Kingdom of Dreams in Gurgaon. According to a December 2012 report on the amusement park industry by Credit Analysis and Research (CARE), there are 150 amusement parks in India, but nothing on Imagica’s scale; “It’s like making 200 movies at once,” says Shetty.

Merchandise of the Mr. India theme ride
Merchandise of the Mr. India theme ride

The first modern theme park was built by Walt Disney in 1955 at Anaheim, California (Disneyland). Disney’s idea was to bring alive the magical characters he’d created on screen so that children (and adults) could interact with them. America was going through its postwar boom which was marked by higher disposable income among the middle class and their search for newer avenues of leisure. What began over 70 years ago is now a $12.9 billion industry globally across five parks.

Logo of the Mr. India ride
Logo of the Mr. India ride

Shetty is making a similar call. Like with IMAX, he’ll be dishing out a new experience which will expand the footprint of the entertainment industry. Unlike his last venture, where he was catering to the high-end customer, this time he’s aiming at the middle of the pyramid.

“The high-end crowd will still go to Orlando and Hong Kong. We’re looking at the urban middle-class family which draws an annual household income of Rs 8 lakh to Rs 10 lakh,” says Shetty. He refers to a recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute, which defines India’s middle class as households with real annual disposable incomes between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 10 lakh, and estimates that the ranks of middle class will soar from 50 million in 2005 to over 250 million in 2015.

Shetty sees a greater appetite for entertainment options from urban families beyond the present offering of movies and malls. “Now they’ve put a roller coaster in a mall in Malad in Mumbai. Next, you’ll see malls become bigger and they’ll put more coasters in them, because there is a captive audience,” he says.

Posters of the rides
Posters of the rides

WHILE THEME PARKS may seem like a lot of fun, they are extraordinarily difficult to run. At Disneyland, for example, the hard work starts at night after the last visitor leaves, when hundreds of workers descend on the grounds to clear litter off the streets, scrape gum off the rails, repaint signs, etc. Wonder La’s Chittilappilly says on an average it costs Rs 5 lakh every day to maintain each of his parks. “It is like running a small city; there’s law and order, crowd discipline, safety, cleanliness, etc. How a park is run depends a lot on the attitude of the management and what their expectations are.” For instance, Shetty spent Rs 5 crore on setting up five water treatment plants at each of his parks to ensure that “even when 5,000 people use the water park, the quality of water is maintained”.

Is Shetty ready for that? Or is he just another wealthy (and bored) man, pursuing his most recent fascination? It’s a notion he’s had to confront. “When I told my friends I was going to do this theme park, most of them weren’t sure how to react. If this works, they’ll say, we knew you could do it. If it doesn’t they’ll say, I told you so,” he says. However, Deora, who has worked with him for the last 13 years says, “This is a long-term project for the family.” In other words, don’t expect an IMAX-Reliance kind of deal, though it’s tantalising to think of what could potentially happen when Disney—they have been interested in India for a while—ultimately firms up its plans.

Today, 1,250 people are being trained to run the park, a number that’ll double next year. Kapil Bagla, an Adlabs Entertainment director, says most of the rides come with maintenance contracts. For Shetty, the maintenance has to be top-class. So he’s picked talent from hotels, malls, and airlines to run the show. Meanwhile, another international partner, Gateway International, has built the ticketing system at Imagica (if badly managed it could be a huge turnoff) around wristbands. “People tend to lose a paper ticket or a card ticket, so we’ve got wristbands which have a chip installed that the ride entry gates will read,” explains Shetty. These bands can also function as an e-wallet that can be used at restaurants and shops in the park.

Deora says their experience with theatres taught them that “if you create a certain environment, it dictates the behaviour of people. If you have a place that is spotless, most people will not belittle it.” While she admits that they are still in the early stages of figuring out training manuals and setting up the systems and processes, some ideas are already operational. A night crew of about 150, consisting of housekeeping, maintenance, plumbing, and electrical staff will be at work after the park shuts down. Then, for the first two or three months, the park will also be shut one day a week “so that we are able to fix slightly complicated issues that crop up and also use that day for training”, she says Ashok Goel, director of EsselWorld, says: “Getting into the theme park industry is like riding a tiger. You’ve managed to sit on top of the tiger somehow, but if you are finding it difficult to sit there, you can’t stop it because you haven’t put a lead tack on it, nor can you get off, because it’ll eat you up.” That may explain why some banks walked away from the deal.

Themes for dreams: Universal Studios Hollywood in Los Angeles
Themes for dreams: Universal Studios Hollywood in Los Angeles

Shetty approached K.V. Kamath, non-executive chairman of ICICI Bank, and a visionary banker who leveraged the power of retail banking in India, but there was no joy from that quarter. “They all say, you start then we’ll come,” he says. A senior executive from a private bank that Shetty approached, who did not want to be named, says that while Shetty’s personal contribution indicates he is serious, “nobody would blow up that kind of money”. His bank wasn’t comfortable with the leverage. He says servicing Rs 1,100 crore of debt isn’t easy, especially given that the concept is untested: “In Mumbai, restaurants change every six months.” By his reckoning, on a scale of one to 10, (10 being most risky) he’d rate this project eight.

But Bagla sees it differently. He argues that banks are usually keen on syndication deals because it gives them a fee income along with the interest income. “We approached the private sector banks much later, by which time Union Bank of India was already leading the syndication.”

The lenders are upbeat. “Besides being an innovative project, the site is very prominent. They have their own land, which has been mortgaged to the banks, and he [Shetty] has given a personal guarantee,” says Nitin Mehta, account manager at Union Bank of India. The location works in Shetty’s favour. An associate from a private equity firm which has exposure in the retail entertainment industry says, “Land [and location] is one of the most crucial factors in determining the success of such a project. The Mumbai-Pune corridor is a great place to be in; that’s where the city will grow.” He adds that even if the park doesn’t end up being a viable business, Adlabs can sell the land and recover some of the cost. Shetty has pledged 297 acres, though the first phase will take only about a third of it. Ideally, Shetty would have also raised funds from the public, but “the flip side of building the park during the recession was that I wasn’t able to go public. For IMAX, I went public before the theatre was built. I cannot do the same now.”

But a slowdown has its benefits. By the time Shetty and his team hit the market for roller coasters, swings, and other rides, it was 2010, and most manufacturers in Europe and the U.S. had empty order books. Shetty was able to strike good bargains, and got commitments for early delivery from most manufacturers. Similarly, instead of outsourcing the job of making facades and props (“Think Avatar,” says Bagla), Imagica has hired a core group of Thai and Filipino artisans who are working with 200 Indian artisans here to create those. The upside: The final project cost has turned out to be way lower than what the first feasibility study done by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2008 had arrived at: Rs 4,500 crore.

Mickey’s Fun Wheel at Disneyland Resort, Anaheim, California
Mickey’s Fun Wheel at Disneyland Resort, Anaheim, California

Shetty says tickets will contribute to 75% of revenue, with the rest coming from food and merchandising. Rating agency ICRA recommended that adult tickets be priced at Rs 1,000; at those prices, it would have taken Imagica three million visitors each year for seven years to make operating profits. Shetty has ignored those recommendations and raised ticket prices to Rs 1,400 on weekdays and Rs 1,900 on weekends. In comparison, a day’s pass at the Hong Kong Disneyland costs Rs 2,800 on most days, while a ticket for a day at Universal Studios in Singapore costs Rs 3,030. “In case we don’t get three million visitors in the first year, the extra Rs 400 to Rs 500 [more than ICRA’s suggestion] will help cover the gap. If we do get three million visitors, we might be able to break even in five years,” he says. The other big idea is to build Imagica as a tourist destination, says Deora. Adlabs has already tied up with hotels in Lonavala and Navi Mumbai to offer holiday packages.

EsselWorld’s Goel says one way of keeping a park ticking is by “adding new attractions. This is what brings repeat visitors.” At EsselWorld, he’d added the Water Kingdom in 1998, which gave it a fresh lease of life. After his recce of theme parks around the world, Shetty had a long list of attractions, only half of which have been worked on. “There are four empty places in the park where we are planning some more rides. I’ll be working on that once this goes live,” he says. Then he looks meaningfully at the master plan pinned on the wall and points to the large space marked ‘Future Expansion’. It looks as though Shetty has found the cure for his boredom.

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