Wet'n'Wild Sydney cost $130M to build — it sold for $40M five years later

Village Roadshow — operator of Wet'n'Wild Gold Coast — opened Wet'n'Wild Sydney in 2013, spending more than A$125–130 million on what was meant to be a second engine for its theme park division. Instead the park was plagued by design, capacity and operational problems from day one.

Attendance kept falling: 173,000 visitors in the first half of FY2018 against 235,000 in the same period of 2016 — a period that was itself down 10.4 percent on the year before. The park posted an A$5 million pre-tax loss for the half. CFO Julie Raffe called the results 'incredibly disappointing', and co-CEO Graham Burke admitted management 'dropped the ball' by running September-to-April seasons longer than the weather could support.

On 29 June 2018 Village Roadshow signed the sale of the park to Spain's Parques Reunidos for A$40 million plus revenue-linked earn-outs — roughly a third of what it cost to build — completed on 3 October 2018, with proceeds earmarked to cut the group's debt.