The first of iQiyi's three immersive experience-based theme parks in the city of Yangzhou will feature content from its streaming platform

Key Takeaways:

• After seven quarters of declining revenue and the departure of its CFO, iQiyi has launched a series of small-scale theme parks to further monetize its intellectual property
• Pop Mart, Miniso and Netflix are also experimenting with high-tech immersive theme parks, hoping to better leverage their content to boost sales

China is known as the land of copycats, including its renown for pirated movies and TV shows as recently as the early 2000s. Still, it's probably mostly coincidence that leading video site iQiyi Inc. (NASDAQ:IQ) opened the first of three theme parks planned for Yangzhou, Beijing and Kaifeng just months after U.S. rival Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) also opened its first two immersive experience-based "Netflix Houses" in Dallas and Philadelphia.

Tickets were sold out for the first day at iQiyi Land in Yangzhou, a major city in Eastern China's Jiangsu province, according to Chinese media reports, That capped nearly a decade of development by an iQiyi team charged with creating content for offline immersive, interactive experience spaces, with nearly 60 offline immersive theaters in 30 Chinese cities already operating.

The new theme parks take the immersive experience a step beyond sit-down theaters, though the spaces are still relatively small. The Yangzhou park is a leased, 10,000-square-meter building, about 1/400th the size of traditional outdoor theme parks. And it cost a fraction of the price for Shanghai Disney Resort and Universal Studios Beijing, whose estimated costs both topped 30 billion yuan ($4.3 billion).

The new iQiyi Land parks will mostly be between 10,000 square meters and 20,000 square meters in indoor spaces that allow for year-round operation and rapid IP refresh cycles, according to Zhang Heng, general manager of R&D. They will include virtual reality, motion systems, scent, wind, sound and live actors, as well as ready-made social media locations, to animate story worlds based on popular films and TV series.

The original Yangzhou iQiyi Land is aimed at females between the ages of 16 and 35. It has seven zones, with immersive theaters, light-and-shadow spaces, stage performances, interaction with non-player characters (NPCs), social games, retail and dining. The company envisions about 300,000 customer visits annually – a small fraction of the 14.7 million who visited the Shanghai Disney Resort in 2024.

"Experience comes first," said Zhang. "We don't want the experience to be affected just for the sake of having more visitors."

The next two parks in Kaifeng, of Central China's Henan province, and Beijing are currently under construction and due to open by year-end. The Beijing location is in a shopping mall in the city's central business district, while the Kaifeng park will be twice the size of Yangzhou, targeting families and male viewers.

iQiyi is badly in need of a new revenue stream. Since the fourth quarter of 2023, when its revenue rose just 1% year-over-year to 7.7 billion yuan, the company's revenue has been falling steadily. The declines continued in last year's third quarter, with revenue down 8% year-on-year to 6.68 billion yuan. And the company slipped into the red in the second quarter of 2025, and reported another loss of 249 million yuan in the third quarter.

Most of iQiyi revenue comes from membership services, which accounted for 4.21 billion yuan, or 63% of the total, in the third quarter of last year. Online advertising services accounted for 1.24 billion yuan in the quarter, or 18.5% of revenue, and content distribution revenue accounted for 644.5 million, or nearly 10%.

‘Interactive and scalable experiences'

"By integrating technologies like AI and XR (extended reality) with our content IP, iQiyi Lands will provide interactive and scalable experiences that are faster to iterate and more efficient than traditional them parks," founder and CEO Gong Yu said last November on the company's earnings call after announcing its latest results. "This approach reduces space and capital requirements, with revenue expected to come mainly from ticket sales and other on-site spending."

As it tries to return to revenue growth and profitability, iQiyi's CFO Wang Jun also resigned from the company in January, without a new permanent person named for the role. The company's shares rose nearly 9% in the two days after the announcement, but have given back all that and more since then and are now down about 10% this year.

iQiyi's shares have lost 90% of their value since the company listed on the Nasdaq in 2018. Its subscriber base has been shrinking, last reported at 102 million in 2023. It competes with market leader Tencent Video, with 110 million subscribers, and Youku, owned by Alibaba, with 92 million subscribers as of 2024. But some of the biggest recent competition for the group is coming from a new generation of short-video specialists led by Kuaishou (1024.HK) and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

Only time will tell if iQiyi's leap into theme parks can reverse its sliding revenue. But it's certainly not the first intellectual property (IP) owner to try out this direction. Consumer spending in China may be depressed by the nation's economic slowdown, but experiential consumption is a rare exception to that malaise.

The industry leader in the relatively new niche of miniature or compact theme parks driven by IP is undoubtedly Pop Mart International (9992.HK), owner of last year's breakout Labubu collectible toys. The company's 40,000-square-meter Pop Land in Beijing's Chaoyang Park launched in 2023, and was the capital city's most popular attraction by 2024, according to rankings from lifestyle app Dianping.

Featuring the furry Labubu and its older Molly character, among other IPs, Pop Land was a main contributor to the company's 748.2 million yuan in its "wholesale and others" revenue segment in 2024, up 50.7% year-on-year. The segment's gain slowed to just 9.4% year-over-year in the first half of 2025, as the figure reached 261.3 million yuan. But the company hopes to jumpstart the segment with the launch of its first overseas Pop Land in a Singapore shopping mall in October.

Pop Mart's co-COO Si De told Reuters last year the company spent years studying Disney's success. "We have learned from Disney for a long time," he said. "In fact, Disney's great value lies in its ability to operate IP over the long term, even up to 100 years."

Retailer Miniso (NYSE:MNSO) (9896.HK) has taken a similar tack with the opening of a 2,000-square-meter Miniso Land store on Shanghai's iconic Nanjing East Road in 2024. The store generated $1.65 million in revenue in its first month and $14 million in its first nine months, with customer traffic eclipsing 10,000 visits daily. The company has quickly expanded the concept overseas, with stores in Bangkok and Sydney.

iQiyi's new theme park gamble is still very much a work in progress, but should certainly be able to contribute new revenue. Visitors who encounter its various IP for the first time are potential candidates for iQiyi's membership programs and core video services, and vice versa. But if the initiative does well, its video rivals are almost sure to follow.

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Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.