France's futuristic theme park becomes a little passé

In Poiters, they have built the future but it does not work.

It worked quite well for a while but the future has an annoying habit of being overtaken by the present. The old future, imagined back in 1987, is looking a little passé.

Futuroscope, France's answer to Disneyland – an "intelligent" theme park dedicated to new technology, especially virtual-reality, cinematic techniques – is in trouble. After a disastrous summer and three years of losses, the company that owns the management rights is throwing in the towel.

The local council, which built the park with the help of national government subsidies, is meeting on Monday to decide its future. And it seems certain to have one. The new Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, comes from Poitiers and was until recently president of the regional council.

Local people, to whom Futuroscope is a source of pride and, directly and indirectly 25,000 jobs, are convinced that "their" Prime Minister will not let them down. But everyone agrees that tens of millions of euros will be needed to build the future close to a medium-sized town in provincial France all over again.

"Off season, we sometimes have more people working in the park than visitors," said one Futuroscope employee yesterday. "The trouble is that most of what you can get here people can now get on CD-Roms and play on their own computers. Even the big screens don't impress people any more."

The park itself, built on 130 acres just north of Poitiers, remains stunning to look at: a range of elegant, science fiction-inspired buildings, surrounded by manicured gardens, fountains, waterfalls and lakes.

Unfortunately, the contents seldom live up to the promise of the exteriors. One pavilion looks like crumpled, aluminium wrapping paper but the show inside is a soft little 3-D movie about panda bears.

Another building looks like a range of organ keys or space rockets but it contains only a split-screen movie about migrating butterflies, shown on a giant screen and on a screen under your feet. It's pleasant, but hardly a vision of the future.

Much more impressive is an attraction added this year, a scary 3-D, cinematic exploration of the universe, projected on a giant dome screen, using photographs of planets and galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope. On the basis of this new show, the park has been rebranded "Planet Futuroscope" but this seems to have further confused visitors already unsure what the theme of the park is supposed to be.

Futuroscope was the invention of a local politician, René Monory, who was chairman of the council of the département of Vienne, but also president of the Senate, the upper chamber of the French parliament. He used his clout to raise private and public cash to build the park as the centrepiece of a new-tech industrial estate.

Poitiers is 200 miles from Paris and far from the tourist stamping grounds. Critics said a theme park meant to be both educational and fun might work near the capital but not here. After a slow start, they were proved wrong. By 1995, Futuroscope was attracting nearly three million visitors a year, making it the second most popular theme park in France, after Disneyland Paris, and the fifth most successful in Europe.

But the public-private company set up to run the park was slow to invest in new attractions. (The monarch butterflies have been there for 12 years.) Few people – only 15 per cent – go to Futuroscope a second time, compared with more than 30 per cent for Disneyland.

Four years ago, the number of visitors began to fall, and a year later a media company, Amaury, bought the management rights. It tried to relaunch the park with minimal re- investment and predictably had little success. This year, less than 1.7 million are expected.

Losses could top €8m (£5.3m) and Amaury wants to lay off 150 workers. Strikes have been held. The council blames Amaury's failure to market the park. Amaury blames the council for failing to grasp that the future is a moving target, and for failing to update the attractions. It has announced it is pulling out of the park next month.

The excellent new space show, "Destination Cosmos", suggests Futuroscope could still reinvent itself, if it focuses more on its main theme (the future) and its target market (those who want something more challenging than Disney).

But one former Futuroscope manager said the problems were all predictable. "They wanted a more culturally profound sort of park than Disneyland, something serious and educational to justify the public investment. They also knew it would have to be fun. Some things they got right but, quite honestly, some of the attractions were neither very educational, nor much fun. Now they're simply out of date."