Niles: Will Warner Bros. take the next step in the theme park business?

Will big changes at one of Hollywood’s leading studios lead to changes in the theme park industry?

Disney and Universal might be the biggest Hollywood names in the theme park business, but Warner Bros. maintains a huge presence in themed entertainment worldwide, as well. Universal licenses Harry Potter from Warner Bros., while Six Flags owns the rights to Warner Bros.’ DC Comics and Looney Tunes characters. Warner Bros. also licenses its name and franchises to branded theme parks in Australia, Spain and the United Arab Emirates, and it maintains growing studio tour attractions in Burbank and the United Kingdom, with a third under development in Japan.

This month, the iconic Hollywood studio changed hands, as AT&T spun off the company into the new Warner Bros. Discovery, combining it with the former Discovery, Inc. — the owner of a wide range of cable TV networks, including Animal Planet, HGTV, the Food Network and its eponym Discovery Channel. That gives the new company an expanded line-up of intellectual properties (IP) that it could license to theme parks, museums and other attractions around the world.

Warner Bros.’ longest relationship in the theme park business has been with Six Flags, which obtained its Warner Bros. licenses in 1984. The old Time Warner obtained control of Six Flags in the 1990s, only to sell the chain by the end of that decade. Beyond a collection of award-winning Justice League: Battle for Metropolis interactive dark rides, Six Flags has not done much with its Warner Bros. franchises other than slap their names on thrill rides and put characters out for meet and greets. Six Flags’ license runs through 2053, according to its latest annual report, so the two companies will be tied together for quite a while.

Meanwhile, Universal has developed Harry Potter into some of the best theme park lands in the world. Outside of the United States, Los Angeles-based Thinkwell Group designed an indoor Warner Bros. World theme park in Abu Dhabi that won the Theme Park Insider Award as the world’s best park after it opened in 2018.

The Warner Bros. Studio Tour outside London has won raves by allowing fans to visit the sets where the Harry Potter movies were filmed. In Burbank, with its hands-on, interactive experiences and new “Action and Magic Made Here” exhibition finale, Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood is the best stand-alone studio tour in Southern California.

Most recently, Warner Bros. has licensed the “IT” horror franchise for an escape room experience in Las Vegas, which happens to be the one market in North America where the Six Flags license does not apply.

Despite all these world-class attractions, most Americans only see Warner Bros. in the parks as character names slapped on Six Flags rides — not the brand on world-class immersive experiences that the studio offers elsewhere. As Warner Bros. enters a new era with the addition of Discovery IP, will it take this opportunity to plan for a new era for its themed entertainment efforts, too?