France just dropped a bombshell that has the entire anime community reeling: President Emmanuel Macron has announced a staggering €6 billion (about US$7 billion) theme park megaproject west of Paris — and one of its parks is expected to be a manga-themed Dragon Ball park. If that number didn’t already make your jaw drop, wait until you hear who’s bankrolling it (and the very messy human-rights storm that comes with the money). This is the anime story that is dominating timelines this weekend, and here’s everything you need to know.
Wait, Did France Really Announce a Dragon Ball Park?
Yes — and it’s bigger than Disneyland Paris. According to reporting from The Japan Times and the BBC, Macron’s office confirmed one of the three planned theme parks is “expected to be manga-themed,” with British public broadcaster BBC going one step further and specifying the park is “expected to be themed on the Dragon Ball series.”
The parks will be built in Cergy-Pontoise, a new development zone roughly 30 kilometers (about 18 miles) outside of Paris. Macron himself framed the project as being on a scale Paris hasn’t seen since Disneyland Paris opened its gates — and claimed it’s projected to create a jaw-dropping 22,000 new jobs.
The Saudi Connection Everyone Is Talking About
Here’s where it gets complicated — and where the internet can’t stop arguing. The French government has partnered with Qiddiya Investment Company, an arm of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. That’s the very same company behind Saudi Arabia’s own planned Dragon Ball theme park, making this a deeply intertwined anime-and-oil-money saga.
The project was approved during a two-day state visit by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) to France this week, with officials from both sides signing a memorandum of understanding. Local reports also suggest one of the parks could be built on the former site of Mirapolis, a theme park in Val-d’Oise that shut down back in 1991 — a fittingly nostalgic bit of park-lore for fans who love a good comeback story.
Why Every Anime Fan Is Split on This
Unsurprisingly, the geek community is deeply divided. On one hand, the thought of walking through a real-life Dragon Ball world — climbing Korin Tower, eating at a Capsule Corp café, dodging a giant Shenron above a Goku statue — is the kind of dream fantasy that anime fans have wanted since the 90s. The Dragon Ball franchise is universally beloved, and a dedicated park would be a pilgrimage site for the fandom.
On the other hand, the optics are impossible to ignore. When asked about partnering with Saudi Arabia despite the kingdom’s heavily criticized human rights record, Macron’s office reportedly answered with a line that has provoked widespread backlash: “At no point, when we attract a project, do we seek to lecture others.”
The comment landed particularly hard given that three journalists’ unions were already protesting the hosting of bin Salman — protests tied to the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. For many fans, it turns what should be a pure dose of childhood joy into an uncomfortable reminder that even our favorite cartoons exist inside real-world politics.
The Dragon Ball Money Machine Shows No Signs of Stopping
This announcement lands at a moment when Dragon Ball is sprinting on all cylinders. Bandai Namco has been milking the franchise across games, and just this week the mobile game Dragon Ball Gekishin Squadra celebrated its first anniversary with the arrival of Super Gogeta plus a full battle overhaul and 140 free capsules. It’s an incredible time to be a fan — the IP has never been more aggressively (and successfully) monetized across every medium, from video games to merchandising.
The theme park is just the latest (and by far the biggest) piece of that strategy. And it’s not the only crossover madhouse happening in anime right now — the industry is in a full-on bleed-into-everything era, with One Piece colliding with Jurassic Park and Detective Conan with Back to the Future in official crossover merchandise. If a French Dragon Ball park comes to life, it would be the single most ambitious physical expression of that trend yet.
What Fans Are Really Worried About
- Will it actually happen? As of press time, no construction dates or opening dates have been announced. Announcements of this scale in France have a history of collapsing under bureaucracy and financing, so a lot of fans are holding their breath.
- Is it really Dragon Ball? “Expected to be manga-themed” and “expected to be Dragon Ball” are still hedged language. Notably, rights holders like Shueisha and (in the West) various licensees haven’t publicly confirmed deals — and fans remember that reports suggest the project may not yet have approval from Dragon Ball’s rights holders. A lot still has to line up.
- Where’s the money really going? The human-rights controversy aside, some fans are asking whether €6 billion is better spent on French cultural infrastructure than on a commercial anime park tied to a foreign sovereign fund.
Viral Speculation: What Would a French Dragon Ball Park Even Look Like?
Let’s have some fun with this, because the fandom already is. The realistic blueprint based on Qiddiya’s Saudi project suggests a park packed with high-octane rides, live Kamehameha projection shows, and immersive zones for each saga arch. Fans are already sketching dream attractions:
- Cell Games Arena — a stadium-style attraction where the crowd is part of the fight.
- Shenron Summoning Show — a nighttime spectacular collecting the seven Dragon Balls on a giant screen.
- Hyperbolic Time Chamber simulator — a 3D ride that supposedly lasts a year but is over in five minutes.
- Kame House water ride — because someone has to deliver a bikini-wearing turtle-hermit cameo.
And the fan theories don’t stop at the park gates. A French Dragon Ball park raises the question of whether Europe becomes the next front in the global anime-theme-park arms race that Japan and Saudi Arabia have already started. If this succeeds, which beloved franchise would you want to see get its own park next? One Piece? Pokémon? The answer is obviously Pokémon, but we’ll let you fight about it in the comments.
The Bottom Line
France just turned a childhood fantasy into a €6 billion headline, and the entire anime community is caught between pure hype and heavy skepticism. Whether it becomes a real, buildable Dragon Ball world or collapses into another grand announcement, it’s already given us one of the most debated anime stories of the year — and it’s barely begun.
So tell us: would you book a flight to a Dragon Ball theme park in France — or does the Saudi money make it a deal-breaker for you? Let us know in the comments below!
