Ron Tan Is A Fan Boy's Dream Maker

To comic book devotees and movie buffs, Ron Tan has the best job in the world. As executive chairman and group CEO of Cityneon, he gets to call the shots when building theme park sets and exhibitions filled with superheroes, robots and dinosaurs. But getting there required true grit.

- Charmian Leong

It was the year 2008 when Ron Tan found himself in a bit of a pickle. He and his two friends had made a pitch to Marvel and Disney to produce a one-of-a-kind exhibition celebrating Marvel’s Avengers franchise – and somehow won it. “I wouldn’t say it was because we had the strongest concept, which was based on delivering experience. Our winning the contract had more to do with everyone else dropping out,” says Tan with disarming frankness. “When we got the contract, we were thrilled – it was a leap of faith on Marvel's part. We popped the champagne after we signed it. But after that everything fell apart.”

With no prior experience in building an exhibition of this scale (or any exhibition at all, really) the trio had to hire 200 to 300 freelancers to work on the project, taking up 50,000 sq ft of space in Valencia, California, even though the exhibition was set to debut in New York. They were now 250 per cent over budget and two weeks late to launch. The pile of letters threatening legal action was growing ominously taller.

In those moments an ordinary man would have crumbled under the pressure, but we don’t put ordinary men on our covers.

Tan wound up saving the day with his extraordinary powers of perseverance. He should not have built the exhibition in California, for example, which was an expensive place to run a business and led to additional costs because they had to ship the products east. “I gave up many, many times – but only in my mind. The next day I would get up, forget the fact that I had given up because there were so many things to deal with, and just keep going,” Tan, 48, recounts. “When people become successful they like to look back and think they had a special part to play in that grand plan, but the only part we played was to keep going, even when we went the wrong way or had to make a lot of U-turns.”