Six Flags has pushed the opening for two of its planned new attractions until the 2025 season.
The company announced via social media today that it has delayed The Flash: Vertical Velocity at Six Flags Great Adventure and Georgia Surfer at Six Flags Over Georgia.
In announcing the delays, each park posted the rationale, "When it comes to delivering fun and safe attractions, we won't rush the construction process."
Of course, with both the Vekoma Super Boomerang at the New Jersey park and the Intamin Ultra Surf in Georgia having been announced to open this year, no construction process was being rushed, as they both were late already. Much of the former Cedar Fair corporate management took over the operation of the now-combined companies last month.
With these delays, we are still awaiting word on the openings of the Expanded DC Universe at Six Flags Fiesta Texas and The Joker: Carnival of Chaos at Six Flags St. Louis, which also were promised for 2024 but not yet debuted.
To keep up to date with more theme park news, please sign up for Theme Park Insider's weekly newsletter.
They really dropped the ball with this one. There had been hiccups in the past, notably with media day for Zumanjaro Drop of Doom being cancelled because the park didn't have a permit to operate the ride, and The Joker breaking down on media day but those rides had at least been completed for all intents and purposes.
This article has been archived and is no longer accepting comments.
Shocker---Note to SF management and marketing: If you don't even start doing groundwork for an attraction until March, it's highly unlikely you're going to be able to open a major coaster before the end of the summer season. This isn't a function of "supply chain disruptions" (an excuse provided in the official press release) or needing additional time to make sure attractions can operate safely, this is because of incompetent project management and an inability to properly manage subcontractors and vendors.
The fact that it took until August 12 (3 weeks before Labor Day and the typical end of daily theme park operations) for them to realize that these new coasters wouldn't be ready for the 2024 season is just further proof of the utter incompetence of the SF teams. While Cedar Fair doesn't exactly have the best track record in terms of managing new projects recently (TT2), at least they have enough sense to communicate issues to their customers pretty promptly when it's clear that there could be an issue (though Montezuma's Revenge went pretty deep into last year before Cedar Fair officially announced a long delay for that project - to be fair, it's a bit different for parks that operate 7 days a week year round, so they are not as reliant on the summer season to create buzz for new attractions).
Frankly, I don't know what's worse, waiting until March to start building an attraction announced for the current season or not making an announcement until mid-August that an attraction is not going to open until the following year.