This $500-million spaceship stadium will host VR events, concerts and e-sports tournaments
Excerpt from Toronto Life Magazine:
As a vice-president of MLSE in the late 1990s, Chris Overholt helped launch one of Toronto’s biggest venues, the Air Canada Centre. Now, amid a pandemic that’s halted live sports and entertainment, he’s developing another: a $500-million complex on the Exhibition grounds that includes a 7,000-seat hall in the shape of an undulating spaceship, as well as a 400-room hotel and, if all goes according to plan, a restaurant from the people behind the Chase. Overholt—the president of OverActive Media, a company partly owned by the Weeknd—believes that when live entertainment returns to the core, premium acts will once again need to compete with the Leafs and Raptors for dates at Scotiabank Arena. He sees his venue as a solution, able to immediately hold 200 events a year: concerts, product launches and e-sports tournaments. As such, the hall will be outfitted with futuristic tech infrastructure like digital walls, virtual reality and whatever other sci-fi-calibre inventions emerge by opening day in 2025.
