Off-screen Bollywood

A theme park in Dubai seeks to recreate the magic of Bollywood through quirky rides and experiences

Dubai is known to go big to draw more tourists. It hosts the world's tallest building, vast artificial islands and sprawling shopping malls, for instance. More recently, the world's largest indoor theme park opened there. And next up, in a bid to please Indian visitors, the first full-fledged Bollywood theme park will be launched in October.

Rides and live experiences spread across a 1.7 million square ft space will pay tribute to the Hindi film industry. The song-and-dance heavy form of cinema could lend itself well to the theme park format. This is not the very first time this has been tried, however. Imagica in Khopoli has at least one simulated ride featuring a battle between film villain Mogambo and Mr India.

The promoters chose Bollywood because "it is the second-largest film industry in the world, with over 2 billion fans across the world," says Thomas Jellum, general manager of the park. He adds that with an increasing "crossover" in Bollywood, where Western actors are participating in Bollywood films and vice versa, Bollywood has become a recognisable cultural phenomenon. He hopes to attract visitors from Pakistan and Egypt, too. The park, part of the larger Dubai Parks and Resorts project, is a seemingly well-considered bet given that more than 2.2 million Indians live in the United Arab Emirates.

Besides, theme parks appear to be the flavour of the season in Dubai, with seven such launches on the horizon. The major experiences at Bollywood parks will be based on specific films.

Various film stars have attached themselves to the project, recording promos in Dubai that the park's publicists are revealing one at a time each week to try and build anticipation. Daily tickets will be priced at AED 285 for adults and AED 245 for children and senior citizens.

In an immersive ride themed around Shah Rukh Khan's Don, visitors will embark on, if one is to go by claims in the film's dialogues, the "impossible" task of catching the undercover cop. Another virtual ride will play out as a battle between supervillain Ra.One and his rival G.One. The cricket match in Aamir Khan-starrer Lagaan will be recreated with a simulator, while the fictional cop Chulbul Pandey in Salman Khan's Dabangg will take on bad guys in an abandoned warehouse. A dark ride featuring laser gun fights will be based on the classic Sholay.

Also among the plans is a stage that will host song and dance performances paying tribute to Bollywood from the 1960s to '80s, an era which the park claims "created the silver screen's first superstars". This is expected to be a trip down memory lane for fans, and an introduction to Indian cinema legends for those unfamiliar with them. Performers were auditioned in different locations including India and Australia, and park operators have found that dancers from Colombia have the most stamina. "With a dance training that is vigorously Latino, they are able to dance in Bollywood style with surprising charm," says Jellum.

The village fair and railway trains, seen as prominent settings in Hindi films, will be recreated too. This is in addition to the Mumbai Chowk zone, which "replicates the hustle and bustle of the Bollywood capital, and a royal plaza that will mimic the riches seen in Mughal-e-Azam". The park operator intends for it to create the same impact as the Harry Potter World did in Orlando, Florida.