Gold Tier Parks
One major difference between the legacy Six Flags and legacy Cedar Fair business models is in capital expenditure or “cap ex.” Cedar Fair tended to carefully balance and measure parks’ success and assign appropriately-scaled additions to a park. More revenue and attendance = bigger projects, and more often. Six Flags, meanwhile, had a long legacy of basically mass-purchasing off-the-shelf rides and installing them across the chain somewhat regardless of that park’s individual needs or strengths.
This “tier” of park – those that are not exactly flagships but are still serious, sturdy, and well-attended properties – are where that difference could manifest in major changes depending upon which strategy the new Six Flags chooses. (HINT: It’s likely that Cedar Fair’s CEO was chosen to lead the new venture because Cedar Fair’s way of doing things begets much more quality and much more appropriate scaling.) Though these parks aren’t necessarily flagships that will receive massive capital expenditure projects every year or so, they’re sturdy, popular, well-invested-in, and highly, highly unlikely to do anything but grow.
- CANADA’S WONDERLAND (Vaughn, Ontario) – Another of the former Paramount Parks, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the new Six Flags would sell off Wonderland, which regularly competes with Kings Island and Cedar Point for attendance and certainly serves as the biggest amusement park in Canada. 2025 will bring Alpenfury to the park, joining a collection that also offers a trio of B&M giants: Behemoth, Leviathan, and Yukon Striker.
- KINGS DOMINION (Doswell, Virginia) – Though Kings Dominion always played second fiddle to its older sister in Cincinnati, this is still a park with a very high quality coaster lineup including Twisted Timbers, Flight of Fear, and Dominator, with the vast new Jungle X-pedition land containing Tumbili, Rapterra, and Pantherian – a reimagined Intimidator 305. It’s also located in a key spot in the Richmond / DC metro area.
- SIX FLAGS GREAT AMERICA (Gurnee, Illinois) – Great America is often considered the most well-rounded of Six Flags parks, largely thanks to its origin. It opened in 1976 (America’s Bicentennial) as one of two sister parks named “Marriott’s Great America.” (Interestingly, the other Great America ended up in Cedar Fair’s portfolio, so via the merger, the two are reunited at last!) This Great America contains the original Batman: The Ride, the Raging Bull hypercoaster, the B&M wing coaster X-Flight, and the RMC Goliath at the top of its lineup, and is a very delightful amusement park all around.
- SIX FLAGS FIESTA TEXAS (San Antonio, Texas) – Fiesta Texas is among the newest and most “master-planned” parks in the chain. (It opened in 1992 – an oddity since the real growth spurt of amusement parks largely occurred in the ’60s and ’70s.) Built into an old limestone quarry (and using it for iconic coaster maneuvers), Fiesta Texas is a gem with signature rides that include the Iron Rattler RMC, Goliath, Superman: Krypton Coaster (the one with Superman standing on the loop), and the new dive coaster, Dr. Diabolical’s Cliffhanger – a Six Flags coaster with an animatronic pre-show! A non-standard amount of love and care seems to go into the park, making it feel filled with personality as opposed to the “cookie cutter” decisions that sometimes leave Six Flags parks feeling interchangeable. This park also competes with SeaWorld San Antonio, creating a nice little enclave for amusement park fans.
- SIX FLAGS NEW ENGLAND (Agawam, Massachusetts) – The park now known as Six Flags New England is one of those amusement parks that began life as a picnic park in the 1870s. Like many Six Flags parks, it was rebranded and wildly expanded around the New Millennium. By most accounts, it’s mid-sized as Six Flags parks go, but it does contain Superman: The Ride. Not to be confused with the (literally) dozen other coasters that bear the hero’s name, SFNE’s Superman: The Ride is an Intamin mega coaster that’s consistently ranked one of the best coasters on Earth in annual polls. The park also has an RMC (Wicked Cyclone), a floorless B&M coaster (Batman: The Dark Knight), and new in 2025, Quantum Accelerator, a multi-launch family straddle coaster.
- LA RONDE (Montreal, Quebec) – One of three parks in the legacy Six Flags chain that didn’t adopt the Six Flags prefix or branding, La Ronde is the second largest amusement park in Canada after its now-sister-park, Wonderland, and the only one of Six Flags’ 27 parks where French is the primary language. Initially, the park was built as a component of the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal. Obviously it has a unique and interesting history all its own, leading up to its sale to Six Flags in 2001 for $20 million (one of the last acquisitions of a then-hungry Six Flags before they started selling parks like crazy). The park is modest in size with just eight coasters, including the Vekoma SLC Ednör, a B&M hypercoaster called Goliath, and a B&M invert clone of Batman: The Ride mercifully called Le Vampire). That makes it a sizable park, especially for Montreal!
- SIX FLAGS OVER GEORGIA (Austell, Georgia) – The consensus around Six Flags’ Atlanta-area park is that it’s not the best Six Flags park, but it’s also far from the worst. The park is home to 11 coasters (with a twelfth on the way for 2025), and that includes a disproportionate number of significant ones! The park has (of course) a B&M Batman: The Ride invert, a custom Gerstlauer Euro-Fighter called Dare Devil Dive, the Goliath B&M hyper coaster, the 1973 original Great American Scream Machine woodie, and the Twisted Cyclone RMC.
- SIX FLAGS MÉXICO (Mexico City, Mexico) – Six Flags Mexico sort of straddles the line between the “Silver Tier” and the “Bronze Tier” in that it’s very much a local / regional park, but it’s the only Six Flags (or Cedar Fair) park in Mexico (and one of the few international Six Flags parks to be retained by the chain after a mass sell-off in the early 2000s). For at least a few years, the park even got an inordinate amount of capital expenditure, maybe suggesting it was beginning to be positioned as a growth opportunity? But those days largely seem over. Today, the park boasts (you guessed it) a Batman: The Ride (but of the inferior Vekoma SLC variety versus the typical B&M invert), Superman: El Último Escape (a Morgan hypercoaster), Medusa (an RMC conversion), and the park’s newest coaster, Wonder Woman (an S&S Free Spin). Nothing groundbreaking, but clearly an important park for the area.
As for the parks we’d rank among riskier tiers? Read on…