Six Flags Entertainment, North America's largest regional amusement park operator, is struggling with weak attendance and financial fallout from a $2 billion merger last year. Now it faces scrutiny from stakeholders who include three-time Super Bowl champion Travis Kelce.
The amusement park giant with 42 theme parks and water parks across North America has gained more attention since Kelce, a Kansas City Chiefs player engaged to pop superstar Taylor Swift, announced weeks ago that he joined activist investor Jana Partners in taking a 9% stake in Six Flags.
But Six Flags may need more than a celebrity investor to help it bounce back from losses and a debt burden of $5.5 billion. In just one sign of company's state, it's permanently closing a park outside Washington, D.C., on Sunday as it looks to sell the property.
The company must overcome a regional amusement park business that faces headwinds as consumers look to spend less money or opt to go to destination parks like Disney or Universal, rivals with newer attractions or family-entertainment centers geared toward young children.
Six Flags "may not be headed to bankruptcy right now, but everybody is looking at 2026," Dennis Speigel, founder and CEO of International Theme Park Services, a consultant group for the leisure-amusement park industry, told CoStar News. Speigel, who has more than 50 years in the business, said Six Flags has major debt payments coming due in 2027. In response, a Six Flags spokesperson said, "Six Flags has no debt maturities due until early 2027, and ample liquidity to address any near-term cash obligations."
The company reported a net loss of $100 million in the second quarter, and investors will be looking closely at its third-quarter results, scheduled to be released Nov. 7. The company's stock lost more than 50% of its value between September 2024 and September 2025 largely because of ongoing attendance weakness, according to a Seeking Alpha report.
Still, the addition of a celebrity investor like Kelce, who grew up going to an amusement park now owned by Six Flags in Ohio, could give Six Flags the boost it needs to begin to turn around its "downward spiral," Speigel said. Last year, Six Flags merged with rival Cedar Fair, considered to be the stronger operator of the two, and the combined entity under the Six Flags brand relocated its headquarters to Charlotte, North Carolina.
Pandemic struggles
Both companies struggled after the onset of the pandemic and park closings in 2020, but Cedar Fair showed more operational skill as its annual attendance after theme parks reopened rose nearly 38% between 2021 and 2022. Six Flags' attendance dropped more than 26% in that time, according to data from International Theme Park Services.
Six Flags restructured its season ticket passes in 2022 under then-CEO Selim Bassoul. In addition to enacting major cost-cutting measures in the wake of the pandemic, he launched a strategy of attracting fewer guests who spent more money at the parks. But that didn't resonate with visitors and the company reported a decline in holders of season tickets, a big part of amusement park companies' business that mitigate weather-related and other visitation disruptions.
Attendance at the combined Six Flags-Cedar Fair parks reached about 50 million last year, and International Theme Park Services expects 2025 attendance to be "flat or slightly up from 2024," Speigel told CoStar News.
Six Flags has ambitious goals, with plans for a "Great Reset" strategy to reach 58 million in annual visitors by 2028, executives said in a May investor presentation. That means Six Flags needs a 16% increase in guests over the next three years, or an annual increase of more than 5.3%, Speigel said. Historically, the combined companies have grown attendance 2% to 3% per year, he added.
"It's doable, but that's if the weather, economy, pricing and product are hitting on all cylinders," Speigel said. "It's aggressive, but doable."
The other unknown is the Kelce-Swift effect that Speigel calls "The Travis Kelce Hail Mary." The New York City-based Jana Partners investment comes at a time when Six Flags is searching for a new leader. Six Flags President and CEO Richard Zimmerman, who once led Cedar Fair, is the latest of four CEOs that have led Six Flags since 2015. Zimmerman announced in August he'll step down from his leadership role by year's end. And Bassoul, who serves as Six Flags' executive chairman, is also exiting his role by the end of the year.
Riding on real estate
Six Flags is already underway on what it calls its "active portfolio optimization program" that includes selling real estate while investing in what it called its top 15 parks, without identifying the properties or what makes them the top.
The company is also selling hundreds of acres of excess land near Kings Dominion, an amusement park just outside of Richmond, Virginia, that came into the Six Flags' portfolio through the Cedar Fair deal.
Another activist investor, Land & Buildings Investment Management LLC, issued an open letter to shareholders of Six Flags last month that outlined how it thinks the theme park company could "unlock" what it perceives to be $6 billion in value by spinning out part of the business to form a real estate investment trust.
This is the third time the activist real estate hedge fund has floated the idea of separating the Six Flags-owned real estate from the operating company, with prior iterations of the idea being proposed in 2022 and 2023.
"Monetizing the company's real estate provides a straightforward means of delivering substantial near-term shareholder gains while preserving operational upside," the firm said in its open letter.
Six Flags, through a spokesperson, said in response to Land & Buildings' open letter that the company's management team and board "remain firmly committed" in its strategic plan to "drive attendance growth, reduce costs and elevate the guest experience."
Matt Ouimet, a former chairman and CEO of Cedar Fair who was also once a Disney executive, said on LinkedIn that Land & Buildings' financial engineering wouldn't solve Six Flags' troubles.
The proposed plan "is just debt in another form with limitations on management's ability to make the best decisions as changing circumstances dictate," Ouimet said.
That sentiment is shared by Speigel, who told CoStar News he has yet to see a successful operating company/property company structure, with the selling of real estate leading to short-term profits, but escalating rent later hitting hard on a company's bottom line. It's unclear which camp Kelce and Jana Partners are in, with Jana Partners declining to comment beyond its prepared statement to CoStar News.
A Six Flags spokesperson said in an email, in response to Kelce teaming with Jana Partners, that the company appreciates the "perspectives of shareholders and take their feedback seriously" as it seeks to "increase attendance, enhance guest experience and drive profitable growth and shareholder value."
Closing time
Six Flags said in May it would close Six Flags America and Hurricane Harbor in Bowie, Maryland, this fall in Prince George's County, east of Washington, D.C. Real estate services firm CBRE was tapped to market the property, where the amusement park operated for more than 25 years, but declined via email to comment on where that effort stands. The land is being touted as a 500-acre redevelopment opportunity.
The site's future remains undetermined, though its reimagination could serve as a needed economic driver for the county. Already, the county is set to lose its National Football League team with the Washington Commanders expected to move in the coming years to the nation's capital. Plus, the state of a proposed new headquarters for the FBI remains in flux as President Donald Trump looks to keep the law enforcement agency in the District rather than allow it to move to a previously selected location in the county that's not the park site.
“It was underutilized and because Six Flags was a place that people would visit, but not stay, we really didn’t realize what we could off that prime real estate,” Aisha Braveboy, the county executive of Prince George's County, said in public remarks in the past month. She said the park operated on 20% of the site and generated about $3 million a year for the county.
But, the Six Flags site is actually much larger than the county’s roughly 300-acre mixed-use National Harbor waterfront development, she said, adding that the opportunity Six Flags presents could draw in at least as much revenue, if not more, than the millions National Harbor yields for the county.
Other Six Flags locations might also shut their gates in the coming years. Operations at the park California's Great America, located in Santa Clara, California, would cease after the 2027 season unless it decides to extend its lease, the company’s chief financial officer Brian Witherow said during the investor day presentation in May. Prior to its merger with Six Flags, Cedar Fair elected in 2022 to sell the underlying land for that site to Bay Area-based logistics real estate company Prologis for approximately $310 million with a lease agreement.
The Los Angeles Times reported in January a spokesperson for Prologis told the outlet it’s “focused on identifying and partnering with planning and design experts to help us create a master plan for the property, working with the city and community along the way." Prologis did not respond to an emailed request for comment from CoStar News.
Lessons learned
Transforming an amusement park into something else is no small feat, but Maryland can look to other similar redevelopment projects — including that of another one-time Six Flags site — for inspiration.
Opened in 2000, what became Six Flags Jazzland in New Orleans closed in 2005 for Hurricane Katrina and never reopened after floodwater devastated the park grounds.
But the long-underutilized site is now getting a second chance under a project called Bayou Phoenix. A masterplan was created in 2023 to transform the roughly 225 acres of land into a mixed-use development. The proposed project would see the creation of indoor and outdoor athletic facilities, an indoor waterpark, a movie studio, a pair of hospitality properties and more. Demolition work at the site began early this year for the project.
The movie studio could open in 2027 and the target time frame for the rest of the site becoming operational is late 2028, Troy Henry told CoStar News in a phone interview. He’s the founder of Henry Consulting, which is leading the project alongside TKTMJ Inc.
Asked what Maryland should be aware of moving forward with a theme park redevelopment, he encouraged soliciting input from the development industry and the general public to ensure compatibility.
“There’s a little bit of an inherent bias in the community as it relates to amusement parks because the residents nearby, and in the region, they view it as a family-friendly destination,” he explained.
Meanwhile, there's hope from the industry that Kelce can help Six Flags as it seeks to gain millions of visitors in the coming years. When the deal with Jana Partners was announced in October, the 36-year-old showcased his family's grainy videos of him decades ago as a child on a roller coaster at Cedar Point, an amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio, that is now part of Six Flags' portfolio.
Kelce reminisced on his popular "New Heights" podcast with his brother, former NFL player and fellow Super Bowl champion Jason, about their family trips to Cedar Point when they were little and visiting Kings Island, a Six Flags' park near Cincinnati, as adults while at football training camps.
"So crazy to even imagine this is real, but you gotta love it when life comes full circle," Kelce said in a social media post.