MGM Resorts has unveiled plans for a spherical venue in Dubai that CEO and president Bill Hornbuckle said will be “equally compelling” as the state-of-the-art venue that opened to much fanfare in Las Vegas last year. The new venue will be the centerpiece of a proposed $2 billion resort complex known as “The Island” which will also include MGM Resorts by MGM Grand, Bellagio, and Aria. Developers did not share an opening date for the new venue.
Announced and approved by the UAE’s ruler in 2017, progress on the spherical venue in Dubai stalled. MGM Resorts’ construction contract for the Dubai venue was finally awarded for development earlier this year.
“[In Dubai] there will be three properties sitting on a large podium and in the middle of it is a sphere,” MGM Resorts CEO Bill Hornbuckle. “Not as big as the sphere in Las Vegas by any stretch but equally compelling. It has 300 seats with a mini showroom and the visual things you’d obviously do inside a sphere.”
While originally proposed to be comparable in size to the unrelated 366-foot Sphere in Las Vegas, which is run by MSG Entertainment offshoot Sphere Entertainment and has a capacity of 18,600, the spherical MGM Resorts venue in Dubai will now have only 300 seats. As of now, MGM Resorts is constructing the Dubai venue independently, but Hornbuckle indicated the company would be open to finding a partner in the future—a sentiment Sphere Entertainment CEO James Dolan shared last year ahead of U2‘s venue-opening residency in Las Vegas.
Inside the spherical venue, guests will be immersed in a visual history of the country. Using the venue’s 3D storytelling capabilities, the venue will chart the country’s tremendous growth over the past 35 years to become a global luxury destination. “The first time I went, I thought [Dubai] was Las Vegas on steroids,” Hornbuckle said. “In 1985 it was desert and literally 35 years later it’s this ‘megatropolis’ with three million people. We’re going to tell that story.”
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