If only there were a way to hop in the TARDIS and travel to 2020.
That’s the year the BBC and Paramount Pictures are planning to open what will likely be every Doctor Who fan’s mecca: a billion-dollar theme park featuring some of the network’s best-known franchises.
The London Paramount Entertainment Resort will be built in Kent on the banks of the mouth of the Thames. Though it’s just in the early stages of development, the agreement reached between the two industry juggernauts would allow the BBC to feature many of its most famous properties in the park.
This would almost certainly include worldwide phenomenons Doctor Who, Sherlock, and Top Gear. Other possibilities like the Masterpiece Theatre hit House of Cards, upon which the Netflix series is based, and national hits like the Great British Bake Off are also eligible for the theme park treatment.
J.K. Rowling‘s two non-Harry Potter-related offerings are also eligible, though it’s hard to see how The Casual Vacancy and the just-announced BBC adaptation of Robert Galbraith’s murder mystery Cuckoo’s Calling might function as family-friendly theme park fare.
The park’s developers hope it will “combine the glamour of Hollywood with the best of British culture,” which is probably a fancy way of saying it will be a major tourist attraction. Which brings us back to Doctor Who and Sherlock.
While a Steven Moffat-flavored funland is undoubtedly eyeroll-inducing to many fans, there’s no doubt it has serious potential. Whovians would line up just for a doubtless terrifying encounter with the show’s creepiest villain, the Weeping Angels. And the intergalactic space travels of the TARDIS would make for one heck of a wormhole roller coaster.
As for Sherlock, well, let’s face it. Just give us a hologram of Benedict Cumberbatch and the theme park will probably recoup its costs in the first year.
The London Paramount Entertainment Resort is scheduled to open around Easter of 2020. We’ll be there.
Illustration by Jeff Bell/deviantART (CC BY-NC-ND-3.0))