Nearly every box office record in existence was just shattered by the unprecedented opening weekend box office numbers Jurassic World brought in. Pulling in $82.3 million on Friday alone, Jurassic World cleared over a half a billion dollars (not to be confused with doll hairs) in its opening weekend (an estimated $511.8 million global box office take). But those staggering numbers are nothing, and I mean NOTHING compared to how much it would actually cost to build and operate a real-life Jurassic Park. A YouTuber ran the numbers on what it would cost, including real-estate, construction, employees, research and development, and general operational costs. You can see the break down in the video above, or down below I’ve provided an additional overview on the insane numbers.
Real-estate: Two islands. Island A is 22-square-miles, Island B is 44-square miles, and both islands are situated off of Costa Rica. Based on real-estate records, two islands off Costa Rica totaling 66-square-miles would come out to around $10 billion.
Staff: The staff requirements for a Jurassic Park would basically cover anything and everything you could think of. From scientists to retail employees. Here’s a few of the more expensive hires listed in the video above: Genetic Scientist $200k, animal caretaker 64k, paleontologist 80k, computer engineer 154k, lawyer 300k. Somehow from those numbers they get to the conclusion that the total cost of staffing would be $7.9 million. It’s a big jump from those salary numbers above, but assumign they’d be scaling a lot of those jobs it’s certainly reasonable.
Research and Development: In order to clone the dinosaurs and breed them Jurassic Park would require a cloning scientist, 50+ dinosaur clones (there are 50 dinosaurs in thepark), surrogates, embryo development, stem cell research, and gene modification. All of this totals up to $8.5million.
On top of that they’d need the amber from which the ‘Dino DNA’ was extracted. This would require multiple amber mines as well as more R&D costs, totaling up to $9 million. That brings the total R&D costs to $25.4 million.
Construction: based on the average cost of constructing the brick and mortar of a theme park Jurassic Park would cost $1.5 billion.
Annual Operations: $11 billion per year ($32 million per day)
Dinosaur care: $207 million
Total cost of building ‘Jurassic Park’ and keeping it running: $23,423,400,000 to get it off the ground, with annual operational costs of $11,907,000,000, which comes out to $32,521,917.80 PER DAY.
Suffice it to say that the ticket price for getting in to Jurassic Park (or Jurassic World) would be astronomical.