Despite mixed reviews, Jurassic World is a certified smash, earning a record-breaking $208,800,000 in its opening weekend. Though that may be the largest domestic opening ever, it takes but a compsognathus-sized bite out of what it would cost to make a real-life Jurassic Park.
Fandango went and crunched the numbers to see what it would theoretically cost to open a theme park populated by cloned dinosaurs, including the cost of land ($10 billion for two Costa Rican islands totaling 66 square miles), park construction ($1.5 billion based on the average cost of the world’s largest theme parks), and legal fees ($300,000 per lawyer). Of course, you’d have to populate the park with actual animals, and that starts with mining amber for dino DNA at a cost of about $9 million. From there, building the creatures would require surrogates, embryo development, stem-cell research, and gene modification, plus the actual cloning. All of that would cost just about $8.5 million, which actually sounds pretty inexpensive, all things considered.
Operating expenses ($32 million a day) and dinosaur care (about $567,123 a day) were also taken into account, bringing the grand total to a staggering $23,432,400,000. And that’s just to get Jurassic Park up and running; the annual operating budget would be $11,907,000,000 to keep it going. For comparison, NASA’s annual operating budget is around $18 billion.
(Page to Screen: A Tale of Two Jurassic Parks)
Some of the calculations used aren’t exactly the most sound (if it costs $150,000 to clone a dog, wouldn’t it cost exponentially more for a dino made from DNA extracted from a mosquito? Wouldn’t Isla Nublar be cheaper because of the constant cloud coverage?), but it’s still a pretty deeply researched calculation. The only question left is who’s going to be the one to run the Kickstarter?
Watch the video explanation below.
