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The State of the Themed Entertainment Industry
A Panel of Industry Leaders at the 30th Annual THEA Awards
6 min readMar 16, 2024
Friday, March 14, 2024, Hollywood
Moderator: Al Cross, PGAV Destinations
Panelists:
Andreas Andersen, Liseberg Group
Yoshi Maruyama, TOCA
Molly Murphy, Universal Creative
Inessah Selditz, Superfly
Kirin Sinha, Illumix
Bruce Vaughn, Walt Disney Imagineering
The following discussion points are among those that stood out to this attendee:
Yoshi Maruyama, who started at Universal, doing business development and then worked at DreamWorks animation under J. Katzenberg , developing themed entertainment using animated content, shared his key learnings:
- Whatever experiences you build have to be enduring. A significant amount of the value of a business is packed in the terminal value, a.k.a. in the longevity of the business.
- You can’t cut corners. At the end of the day, when you cut corners, you don’t deliver on your brand promise. And…