MovieTowne to open dinosaur theme park

MovieTowne will turn 20 years next month and the celebrations will include the opening of a dinosaur theme park.

DinoWorld – named after the pet dinosaur of lead character Fred in the classic 1960s animated television series The Flintstones – is expected to open in the first week of November at Carousel Park, Invaders Bay, Port of Spain.

Patrons will encounter more than 20 life-like dinosaurs ranging from five to 24 feet as they explore the forest, and these animatronic creates will entertain by roaring and fighting, a media release said.

Derek Chin and his team have been working on this project for some years. The MovieTowne founder said in the release, “This is my gift to all those kids and people who just love dinosaurs and history. I’m so happy that despite all the challenges, including inclement weather, we can at last see the end and hopefully the opening becomes a reality early next month.”

DinoWorld will also include dinosaur rides, photo-booths and a fully-stocked merchandise kiosk.

MovieTowne changed the landscape of modern movie entertainment locally with its first multiplex cinema.

Chin has gone on to open branches over the years in San Fernando, Tobago and Chaguanas, but closed the latter two years ago because of challenges related to the covid19 pandemic, the release said.

He completed a ten-year project when he opened MovieTowne in Guyana, where he was born, in March 2019. The complex has a mall and restaurants.

DinoWorld fits into people's fascination with dinosaur movies and dinosaurs. A devastating asteroid reportedly hit the planet around 66 million years ago and wiped out dinosaurs after they had ruled for about 180 million years, the release said.

Jurassic Park, the first of a six-film blockbuster series about dinosaurs in a theme park, became the highest worldwide grossing movie of all time when it debuted in 1993, and it is now ranked 30th on the list – with over US $1.1 billion in movie sales.

However, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the penultimate movie in the series, has passed the original and is in 17th place with over US$1.3 billion. Jurassic World, which came out three years before, in 2015, is the 51st and final billion-dollar movie on the list.

Chin is extremely grateful “to all my hard-working staff who spent a great deal of time to make DinoWorld come together. We look forward to continuing to develop it into a beautiful unique attraction to Trinidad and Tobago.”