Building Jurassic World

Bioscience companies are turning science fiction into reality. In the past year alone, Colossal has revived the Dire wolf and introduced a woolly mouse. A key step toward resurrecting the woolly mammoth. A real-life version of the Jurassic World zoo may no longer be a fantasy. Thanks to cutting-edge advances in genetics, the question isn’t if this will happen, but when.

In the twenty-first century, visiting a zoo feels a bit outdated. Much like the circus, which lost its charm after the 1930s, zoos have shifted focus from entertainment to conservation as visitor numbers have declined to unprofitable levels. There was a time when zoos were the only way to see exotic animals. If my great-grandfather wanted to see a lion, he had two choices. Wait for a traveling circus to come through his town or visit a city zoo. That was it. Today, if I want to see a lion, I just pull out my phone and I can see more lions in five minutes than he could have imagined in 1920.

The honest truth is that zoos no longer make financial sense. Crowds aren’t lining up to see elephants in person anymore, and there are no newly discovered monkeys from distant lands to capture a city’s imagination. Thankfully, animal rights have come a long way which means no more animal performances to draw a crowd. The zoo industry is hanging on by a thread. Even Melbourne Zoo is in the process of “de-zooing.” In ten years, they envision a space that looks more like an ecological garden than traditional animal exhibits.

That could all change with the return of woolly mammoths, Tasmanian tigers, and Dire wolves. Imagine the line to see a woolly mammoth back from extinction, alive and breathing right in front of you. A real-life Jurassic Park raises a fascinating question. How much would it actually cost to build something like that? What would it take, financially, to recreate the park pictured in Jurassic World? The idea might not be as far-fetched or as far away as it once seemed.

In the movie, the park map features twenty different dinosaur species. By combining details from the film with data from large international zoos, we can estimate what it might take to care for these prehistoric stars. A team of 10 genetic scientists, 5 palaeontologists, and a 120 animal caretakers would likely be required to meet their needs. Staffing alone would cost around $7.8 million per year.

Genetic Scientists – 260’000*10

Palaeontologists – 120’000*5

Animal Caretakers – 65’000*120

Total = 7’800’000

That’s just the cost of caring for the animals. Let’s go back to the beginning. Acquiring the island, clearing roads, and building harbour and helipad infrastructure would cost nearly $2.2 billion at today’s rates. Private islands large enough to house a park like this don’t come cheap. Constructing hotels, a visitor centre, control rooms, and similar facilities would add another $4 billion. Estimating the cost of the gyrospheres featured in the film was a bit tricky. We treated them as high-end amusement park rides rather than transportation infrastructure. If you consider them more of a transport project, the total construction cost jumps closer to $6 billion.

Once the animal pens are built and the main facilities are in place, the park would need to be just as high-tech as the one we see in the movie. The control room, for example, appears to have at least 12 IT system engineers working at any given time based on scenes featuring Bryce Dallas Howard. That suggests a full team of around 40 staff would be required. With an average salary of $125,000 per year, that adds another $5 million annually in control room staffing costs.

The park is shown to have 14 herbivores and 6 carnivores. You might think estimating the cost of feeding a T. rex and its prehistoric friends would be difficult but it’s actually easier than you’d expect. Fortunately, the San Diego Zoo has published data on the cost of feeding their animals. By breaking those costs down by weight and adjusting for inflation, we can apply them to what we know about the dinosaurs’ eating habits. The best estimate? Around $400 million per year just for food.

Of course, the park would also have restaurants and merchandise. Jurassic World is packed with branded gear and souvenirs in the movie and all of that costs money, surprisingly a lot. By counting the number of direct-to-consumer stores and food vendors shown, and applying industry averages, stocking Jurassic World with all its goodies would cost around $500 million. That’s more than the cost of feeding the prehistoric beasts.

One thing we see throughout the movie is the theme park staff liaisons helping visitors with directions, tickets, and other needs. A park the size of Jurassic World would require around 2,000 employees, plus an additional crew for maintenance. Staffing and operations would add another $200 million per year.

Have you been keeping track? There’s just one more line item to consider, and this was perhaps the trickiest to estimate. At the centre of Jurassic World is the Mosasaurus enclosure. It features a stadium that moves underground during the show, a huge feeding mechanism and a massive pool of water. Since we know the size of the Mosasaurus, this is our best chance at making an estimate.

The mosasaur pictured in the film is between 20 – 30 metres. The stadium sits roughly 30 – 40 feet above water, as seen when the mosasaur jumps for its food at the beginning of the movie. The full mosasaur is seen lunging full bodied from the bottom of the pool, using some other frames, the pool would have to be roughly 100 feet deep. More importantly, around 18.7 million gallons of water. That is more than 6 Olympic swimming pools worth of water. After a lot of referencing back and forth between stadium construction, concrete rates, using everything currently available my best estimate is that the attraction alone would set the park back 2.5 Billion dollars to complete. It is just so large and so complex.

Building Universal Studios is estimated to have cost around $7 billion USD. Our estimate to build a real-life Jurassic World comes to $9.3 billion USD. That is about 14.3 billion AUD at the current exchange rate. This is a conservative estimate. Unfortunately, this doesn’t include the cost of the dinosaurs themselves. For that, we’ll have to wait and see what Colossal can come up with.