SAN FRANCISCO-Disney chief executive Robert Iger has said that nearly a million people have visited the entertainment giant’s theme park opened less than a month ago in mainland China.
“It would be safe to assume almost a million people have experienced the park,” Iger said during an on-stage chat at a Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado.
Visitors to the park are staying longer than expected each day and showing fondness for Chinese barbecued pork with rice, cheeseburgers and turkey legs, according to Iger.
“We are introducing turkey legs to China,” Iger quipped. “Which I thought was a mistake, but we are selling 3,000 a day.”
Each turkey leg, sourced from Poland, costs more than $8 US. Disney set the entrance fee at 499 yuan ($76) during peak periods and 370 yuan ($56) for other times, in a country where the average monthly disposable income is just $278.
Disney opened the massive Shanghai theme park to the public in mid-June, hoping to win over communist-ruled China’s growing middle class with the ultimate American cultural export. The Shanghai resort is the US company’s sixth in the world and the first in mainland China — there is already one in Hong Kong. Disney tailored park attractions for China and left out some American trademark features, such as Main Street USA. “I very much wanted to avoid being called a cultural imperialist,” Iger said of work that went into tuning the Disney park for Shanghai.
