Genting SkyWorlds is one of the most highly anticipated new parks due to be opened in the near future, particularly for us here at the Dark Ride Database. The Malaysian park has had several planned opening dates during a turbulent history, the latest of which is now still overdue. Even though the park has not yet officially opened, guest activities have been going on within the gates for the past few months. Some pictures and videos offer a glimpse of the new dark rides in the park.
Genting SkyWorlds was originally announced under the name 20th Century Fox World back as far as 2013, shortly before the closure of the Genting Outdoor theme park that operated in it’s place at the time. The project was to be a grand renovation that included several new lands themed to well known film franchises and was at one point billed to open in 2016.
2016 came and went, with limited news on the development in construction and after a couple of years it was determined that Fox Entertainment had pulled out of the contract by 2018. Plans obviously had to change at this point and progress was put to one side while certain legal matters were attended to. Eventually, there was a positive outcome to these and the project persisted, complete with a license to use some intellectual properties from Fox.
The more obvious signs of construction really began to ramp up during 2021, with the park promoting a lot of material, unveiling a full lineup of themed lands and expected attractions in August. The new Genting SkyWorlds theme park was finally expected to open before the end of the year. At the moment of writing this article, there have been several months of technical rehearsals, soft openings and the park is accessible to the general public. However it appears that guests cannot yet plan ahead or expect a guaranteed lineup of attractions and the official park website remains as an advert for what’s to come rather than providing visitor information.
In terms of dark rides, we have so far seen sneak previews from a handful of guests who have had the opportunity to experience them:
- First we saw a video of the queueline scenery and onride footage of Night at the Museum, a screen based interactive dark ride.
- In early December a visitor uploaded a video of the park’s Flying Theatre attraction Independence Day: Resurgence, however this is no longer available online.
- More recently, this footage of the Epic Voyage to Moonhaven boat ride revealed that the attraction was now open for technical rehearsal, showing off several dark ride scenes that can be found within.
The status of other dark ride attractions is not yet known, in particular an SFX coaster from Dynamic Attractions located in the Andromeda Base themed area. This is the second of it’s kind to be built in the world, though the first installation at Ferrari World Abu Dhabi has not yet opened either since construction began there over 5 years ago.
With approximately half the attractions in the park now being open to some extent, the official opening date of the park is still open to speculation. The Christmas holiday season was the most recent educated guess amongst visitors, but although the park put on a special seasonal event for this, there was no notable change in attraction availability. The latest speculation comes from a quote in an article by a Maybank analyst, who wrote “We expected Genting SkyWorlds to open on December 10, 2021, but it did not come to pass. Channel checks inform us that Genting Malaysia is ‘ironing out’ software issues and hopes to open Genting SkyWorlds for Chinese New Year.”
Chinese New Year, which marks the commencement of the Spring Festival holiday period, will take place on 1st February 2022. We will update the status of our database listings once we have confirmation of official opening.
