Chinese streaming platform iQIYI has confirmed plans for a new themed entertainment venue in Hangzhou, marking the company’s fourth theme park announcement of 2025 and reinforcing its shift towards small-scale, highly immersive location-based entertainment.
The iQIYI (Hangzhou) Theme Park was formally signed on 15 December at the Hangzhou Digital Cultural Tourism Industry Conference (杭州数字文旅产业发展大会).
The project will be located within the city’s Olympic Sports Centre precinct, inside the Cultural Twin Centres complex adjacent to the Hangzhou Olympic Stadium, commonly known as the “Big Lotus”. The park is scheduled to open in 2027.
Covering approximately 15,000 square metres, the Hangzhou development will be iQIYI’s largest theme park to date, although it will still be significantly smaller than traditional destination parks.
Instead, the project reflects iQIYI’s deliberate move towards a compact, content-dense and fast-iterating park format, designed to translate screen-based IP into immersive, repeatable offline experiences.
From streaming platform to physical experience
iQIYI’s expansion into themed entertainment comes amid broader pressure on long-form video platforms to diversify revenue and engagement models.
In September 2025, iQIYI founder and CEO Gong Yu said offline businesses would become a core growth pillar, with theme parks and IP-derived products playing a central role.
Unlike traditional theme park operators, iQIYI is adopting a “light asset, strong operations” model.
The company provides IP, creative planning, and operational systems, while local governments or commercial partners are responsible for construction and capital investment.
This approach enables a quicker rollout, lower risk, and rapid content updates, drawing on the logic of internet product iteration rather than conventional park development cycles.
A new generation of small immersive parks
iQIYI’s parks typically range from 5,000 to 20,000 square metres, with a focus on high-intensity experiences rather than scale.
The Hangzhou park is expected to deliver around four hours of immersive content, combining full-sensory theatres, holographic environments, NPC interaction, mixed reality (MR) gaming and digital scenography.
The experience design will draw heavily on iQIYI’s popular drama and genre IP, including titles such as The Knockout (狂飙), Mysterious Lotus Casebook (莲花楼), Love Between Fairy and Devil (苍兰诀) and Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty (唐朝诡事录).
In contrast with traditional theme park rides, these IPs will be reimagined through interactive storytelling, live performance, spatial media and game-like participation.
Strategic fit with Hangzhou’s digital identity
iQIYI executives have highlighted Hangzhou’s role as China’s leading digital economy city as a key factor in the project’s positioning.
The Hangzhou park is expected to place greater emphasis on AI-driven interaction and data-enabled experience design, aligning with the city’s technology ecosystem and younger, tech-savvy audience base.
Following earlier announcements in Yangzhou, Kaifeng and Beijing, the Hangzhou signing extends iQIYI’s offline footprint across eastern and northern China.
For the wider industry, the project signals how streaming platforms are redefining the boundaries between content, technology and themed entertainment – suggesting that the future of theme parks may be smaller, brighter and more deeply integrated with IP ecosystems, rather than simply bigger.
