The day Niagara Falls stopped flowing many people living in the area thought the world was coming to an end. Just before midnight on March 29, 1848, thousands of tons of ice jammed the mouth of the Niagara River by Lake Erie. Only a trickle of water was finding its way to the falls. Local residents awoke to silence on the morning of March 30, the roar of the falls that had been as constant a presence as the ground beneath them had ceased. For as long as anyone could remember, the incessant pounding of the two waterfalls was audible from a half mile away. It is the sound of more than 6 million cubic feet of water slipping over the crest and crashing 170 feet down, every minute of every day, without fail. The snuffing out of such a primal force could only portend the apocalypse.

As luck would have it the end of the world didn’t happen that day or the one after. Instead, the wind shifted, the ice jam broke up, and the falls went back to their thundering ways.

And Niagara has never gone silent since.

The Rules of Attraction

When the exploration party of Robert Cavelier led Father Lewis Hennepin to the foot of the falls in 1678, the awestruck monk fell to his knees and set up an altar on that very spot. Since then, boats, balloons, and the occasional barrel have brought millions of tourists face to water-soaked face with the two massive wonders. Tasked with the trillions of gallons of outflow from four of the Great Lakes, which contain one-fifth of all the fresh water in the world, the Niagara River flows into Lake Ontario. Every year, 14 million visitors from all over the world come to see Niagara Falls, the second-largest waterfall on the planet. After they’re through being amazed by the falls, many of them suddenly realize they don’t know what to do next.

Thirteen stories above this natural wonder in Niagara Falls, Ontario, is a garish spectacle of tourist attractions, a whirlwind of cheap souvenir shops, wax museums, and nondescript fast food restaurants. Throngs of people surge through the streets looking for something to match the splendor of the falls, and they usually fail to find it. But in the midst of all the gaudiness there is a development group working to give the area overlooking the falls a dramatic facelift.

In the early 1990s, the Canadian Niagara Group (CNG) purchased the Sheraton on the Falls, the Brock Plaza, the Hampton Inn, and the Skyline, all Falls Avenue hotels directly across from the American waterfall. These hotels did great business at the height of the tourist season and then limped through the rest of the year accomodating newlyweds. “Back then, tourists typically viewed Niagara as a nice day trip or a honeymoon getaway,” says director of marketing Gord Arbeau. The Canadian side of Niagara Falls, although not as barren as the U.S. side, didn’t have much to offer vacationers beyond the falls. CNG wanted to transform the 20-acre block of hotel property into a centralized all-inclusive family destination. But they were missing an essential piece of the development puzzle—a nightlife.



On December 9, 1996, after several years of legal wrangling, the Ontario government brought the nightlife to Niagara and placed it smack dab in the middle of the 20-acre Falls Avenue complex. Casino Niagara opened its doors to a stampede of tourists eager to stay up all night gambling. As it rapidly became a draw all its own, the casino extended

the seasonal success of Niagara Ontario into a year-round destination. Its instant success elevated CNG to a position from which they could handpick the potential partners. With plenty of recognizable names vying for a spot on Falls Avenue, CNG was holding all the cards.

Marvelizing Niagara

The Falls Avenue complex, now populated with a Hershey Superstore, Hard Rock Café, Rain Forest Café, and the first ever World Wrestling Entertainment retail store, is CNG’s dream in the making. It is on its way to becoming a mini Las Vegas with something for every member of the family to do. Now the group has launched its latest venture and flexed its muscle with superhero power. In an ongoing effort to round out the attractions to tempt kids as well as adults, the company’s latest sidekick is Marvel Enterprises. After a banner year at the movies—Spider-Man, DareDevil, and The Hulk combined to make about $1.2 billion at the box office—Marvel licensed its core comic-book superheroes to CNG for the first in a soon-to-be franchise of Marvel Adventure Cities.

CNG Marketing Manager Gord Chow says Marvel and CNG were an obvious marriage because they were able to meet each other’s needs—Marvel wanted a successful debut for its new enterprise, and CNG wanted a recognizable, family-friendly brand in their corner spot. “Kids want to come see the falls, but they can only look at them for so long,” Chow says. “So we give them entertainment. That’s what Marvel does, and it reaches the younger kids, which is great because there’s not a lot for them to do at Niagara Falls.”

Paul Gitter, vice president of product/retail development for Marvel, says Niagara Falls, Ontario, is just the kind of location the company envisioned when planning a themed retail/entertainment outlet. “Niagara [Ontario] is a good place for us to be because it’s more of a destination-based place. Its success will be primarily a result of where they’re located,” Gitter says. “There are 16 million customers who are walking within one square mile. So it’s a good venue because it already has an existing entertainment component, meaning restaurants and other attractions where consumers tend to spend time. That’s where we plan to move into as we look to grow this business.” Other locations in the works are Times Square in New York, the Las Vegas Strip, and Mall of America in Minnesota, among others.



As visitors approach the main square directly across from the falls, a massive, bulging green freak is frozen in mid-flex, hanging off the side of the building that houses Marvel Adventure City, the Rain Forest Café, WWE, and, as of a month ago, the MGM Studios Store. Just in front of the 30,000-square-foot self-contained city is a beckoning Spider-Man, sleeker, thinner, and more stylized than his original form. He’s been repackaged by Marvel for a whole new generation. Every few minutes Spider-Man and his nemesis, the Green Goblin, exchange taunts and challenge sidewalk strollers to confront the heroes and villains within. “All of our rides are interactive,” says Gitter, “meaning for X-Men, you don’t just get in the bumper cars and ride around and bump into people; you ride around and you play laser tag and you shoot the other cars, keep score, and ultimately earn a medal.”

The Naked City

Designed by the Toronto-based Forrec, Gitter sees the distinctive appeal of Marvel Adventure City lying in the combination of interactive themed entertainment and exclusive Marvel merchandise. Kids can grab candy from the Fantastic Four laboratory, compete in the X-Men-themed bumper cars, or race on a DareDevil obstacle course. There’s even a play area for pre-schoolers called Spidey and Friends. The jewel in the Adventure City crown, however, is Spider-Man The Ultimate Ride, an interactive dark ride designed by a small St. Louis-based company called Darkrider, formerly known as Halloween Productions.

Larry Kirchner, president of Darkrider says, “[CNG] wanted Spider-Man to interact with the riders; they wanted riders to be able to shoot targets, for Spider-Man to battle a bunch of villains. They also wanted it in a very narrow space and built on a very limited budget.” According to Kirchner, Darkrider was able to do it for a lot less than anybody else because they are a small company. This was the only project they worked on for six months. Darkrider built the entire ride in St. Louis then broke the modules apart and reassembled them in Niagara.


Since it didn’t have the space to build a New York City set, Darkrider combined comic-book-style painted scenery with ChromaDepth glasses to create convincing 3D illusions. “We have a scene where Dr. Octopus is going to burst through a wooden wall in a warehouse, but we couldn’t really have him break through. So we projected an image of the wooden wall on the screen and then painted up to it so it all blends together. When the ride comes through it triggers the images of Dr. Octopus breaking through the wall.” The company also had to develop a lot of water effects and props that came very close to the riders and sometimes right on top of them, such as a crane that almost falls in the riders’ laps.

Overall Kirchner is pretty happy with how the ride turned out, but he definitely thinks he could fit in more villains to shoot. In the ride, Spider-Man and the villains were designed to fly above the cars as computer-generated projections. “The problem with projecting is that you need to rear project so riders only see the image that you want them to see, not the overspray. But that wasn’t possible in the space because it was too small.”

Chow believes that the ride is popular because it combines a targeting game with a lot of 3D elements, but mainly because it’s about Spider-Man. “As icons, characters such as the Hulk and Spider-Man are incredibly strong. That’s why we wanted to build an attraction around them.”

Stan and Deliver

Created more than 40 years ago by writer and former chairman Stan Lee and artists Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, the stable of Marvel superheroes is enjoying a major resurgence. Spider-Man and the Hulk can be found everywhere from cartoons to games to multiplexes. The phenomenal success of the X-Men and Spider-Man movies proved that Marvel could make more money licensing its characters than it did selling comic books and toys. After emerging from bankruptcy in ’98, Marvel decided to de-emphasize the comic-book businesses and focus on licensing, which had proven to be more profitable—Marvel became agents for their own characters.

And after publishing millions of comic books, the company has a healthy stable of characters that movie studios are eager to mine, so there isn’t much of a risk of Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Hulk being Marvel’s only hits. “There are 4,700 characters that are owned by Marvel. But Spider-Man is far and away No. 1. Then comes the Hulk and the X-Men—beyond that the characters kind of fall off,” explains Chow. “That will change as Marvel debuts movies such as The Punisher movie the company is making. Nobody ever heard of DareDevil before the movie came out. Now, thanks to Ben Affleck, there’s some brand recognition.”

Along with licensing is the business of selling merchandise, which is dependant upon the success of the movies. Two-thirds of Marvel’s $155 million in net toy sales for 2002 came from products associated with the Spider-Man movie. It naturally follows that, to extend the brand beyond the multiplex when a movie comes out, Marvel needed some sort of themed destination for kids that they could drop into tourist and suburban markets.

Gitter says, “The business model [with Marvel Adventure City] is like anything else that Marvel does where there’s no exposure from Marvel financially. We’ve licensed it out to a partner who has invested in the real estate, the build out, and the ongoing operations. So our model is no risk. We are paid by the licensee to have the rights to the Marvel franchise.”

So far, the Canadian Niagara Group has managed to put together a successful mix of licensed properties. Its location across from the falls and the homogenous mix of brands result in a place where families can go and be entertained.

For adults, the casino is a lively place to spend an evening. The Hard Rock Club provides an outlet for the younger crowd looking to get their groove on. For kids, there’s a place to race their friends, win prizes, and hang out with Spidey and Friends.

Or, if all that gets old, there’s always the waterfall.