Six Flags declines to buy full ownership of its first park

So the licensing checks from Qiddiya have not arrived yet? Or worse, they won't be enough to allow SFEC to cover the cost of a payment two years from now?

I can't see a scenario in which this is good news for Six Flags. "We aren't committing to a purchase that we cannot afford today," is hardly a good look, even if it might be true. And I can't imagine how the price for buying SFOT would go down, given real estate trends in the Metroplex and the addition of what should be a popular coaster.

So this appears to be Six Flags kicking the can down the road. Again, not good news for anyone.

This decision makes very little sense. However, SF is one of the most cash-poor publicly traded companies (outside of start-ups and tech firms), so perhaps indicating that the company could find the cash to fund this option, other creditors could come calling. On the other hand, what makes little sense here is that the company seems to think its value is in its real estate (why they chose to close SFA and constantly note the possibility of divesting some of their un/under-utilized land), so not having full ownership of the Arlington property would significantly devalue the assessment of the namesake's O.G. park, which they are investing tens of millions of dollars into this year with the addition of Tormenta (I wouldn't be surprised if the record-setting B&M cost more than $30-40 million).

I guess the real question is how much would the 2028 option actually cost, and who are the current joint owners of the park? Considering that they triggered the option at SFoG (my guess is that SFStl was also part of this being one of the original 3 parks), the buyout for the Texas park must have been deemed too rich and this is a deliberate tactic to negotiate a lower price. Did executives feel that they overpaid for SFoG and don't want to do it again in Texas, was this rubber stamped before sound management (i.e. former Cedar Fair execs) was in place who now see these options as foolish investments, or does the current management have issues with the joint owners in Texas that didn't exist when the SFoG option was triggered? The perception was that Cedar Fair made a similar call with Great America and played chicken until they had the park literally sold out from under their feet. Given that experience, and SF's assessment and valuing of their real estate portfolio, you'd think this would be a no-brainer to trigger the option here assuming the cost was reasonable.

Something odd is afoot here, especially given the company relocating its headquarters from across the street from this park (in the old Texas Rangers' Stadium and in a very pro-business state) to Charlotte, NC (also pro-business, but not as attractive as Texas) after the merger. With 2 other parks in Texas (SFFT and Schlitterbahn), could the original SF park be divested with Tomenta being used as a pot sweetener, or do we have another game of chicken?

Maybe they should set up a GoFundMe.

I remember even back in the mid 80s when I worked at SFOG feeling like the best thing the then “owners” of Six Flags could do would be to buy out the mysterious limited partners so the company running the parks could really run the parks. At Georgi, we’d see the parks that were part of the system, but not part of the limited partners getting really amazing new rides and other capital investments, while Texas, Georgia and St. Louis would get minimal funding.
I always wished we could get out from under that situation. Seems like it won’t be ending anytime soon.

This is an odd decision based on past statements, but I suspect that after the disaster of a year they've experienced, taking on another ~$400 million in debt for this buyout is probably not a good look for the company at this time. I don't interpret it as a lack of interest in the property, but instead a necessary choice to avoid falling into bankruptcy. If they can get a positive cash flow going and pay down the debt they're currently carrying, I could definitely see them making an offer on a buyout five to ten years down the road, but when you'd probably need to sacrifice one or two additional parks in the chain (in addition to the four or five likely getting sacrificed already), the math just doesn't work out in favor of pulling the trigger.

Last fall I bought an annual pass for like $60 that's good through 2026 at all SF and CF parks. I am using it at 7-10 parks, including some of their biggest and most successful parks (CP, CW, SFGAm, possibly SFGAdv). Other than the pass I haven't spent a single penny at Six Flags.

For comparison, I pay $190 for my daughters annual pass (for one person) to my local small indoor FEC, and that's just for the trampolines and slides. Does not include go-karts or some of the other stuff they have.

I know the previous CEO (the soup nazi) publicly complained about their clientele being poor, raised prices, and the parks were dead/the stock tanked. However last year even with this insane sale they had going I still felt like the parks were relatively slow when I went, and that was what was traditionally the busiest time of year.

TBH I have seen this doom loop going for like 30 years now and "cheap season pass, poorly ran and maintained park" is just Six Flags. Several generations of Americans now have this experience of that being synonymous with Six Flags. The golden ages of these parks, when they were actually ran decently from like the 70s-90s, was basically an aberration when it comes to the full history of these parks now.

The strategy of "sell the small parks and invest that capital into the big parks to fix them up" makes sense, however that was the same strategy they had from like 2004-2007 and they still ended up going bankrupt. Maybe the merger and addition of a bunch of major parks will get them out of this, however I don't have any confidence at all in the business model of this company I have seen struggle for the last 30 years.