It's definitely the latter, but through the power of repetition people started to believe it was the former.
That last point is another place where I expect a huge fiction-reality gap. If I pay to watch a movie about a dinosaur getting loose, I want to see it shrug off bunker-busting missiles from fighter jets, with big fireball explosions and people jumping in the air and the hero magically surviving. I don't want to see a short, sad walk down to the city park where they try and fail for an hour to coax it back and ultimately decide that they have to shoot it with a slightly larger than average rifle. That's the boring and horrible but realistic scenario.
There's nothing wrong with the movie scene not being realistic, but there is something wrong with blindly assuming that the movie scene is realistic.
That's... kinda my point!
Zoos keep large animals in significantly smaller areas that are easier to control and maintain. I can see someone making "Jurassic Zoo" where you're keeping a few fairly docile dinosaurs in an area of a few acres. I don't have hard data but the territories in Jurassic Park look like they were measured in square miles.
Re: enclosure size, that's because city land is expensive, not because the mathematics of chaos theory dictate that it is impossible to hold an animal in a large enclosure. Come on.
It's still fiction and not an attempt to realistically estimate the rate at which problems would happen or the magnitude of those problems if they did. Look to zoos if you want a realistic point of comparison for the risk analysis -- but not if you want to watch a T-Rex chase kids in Jeeps.
I thought this was more applicable.
Have you watched the show? It's "public", but it's so huge that the guest concentration closer to rural town than disney world.
It's a cute idea but that would be stupidly expensive. It would be difficult to compete with the nearby hotel that includes 10 robo-whores complementary with each night at 1/100th of the price; or a giga-chad sex machine that you can just purchase for home use. For sex, or, actually, just as a worker to do real labor because that's a hugely valuable task to society rather than playing pretend saloon whore for a few billionaires.
[Spoiler]
They did mention that the real money maker for the park was information collection, not the admission fees.
>Arnold organizes a demonstration of the hosts to convince Logan to invest in Westworld. Logan's father, James Delos, is critical of his son's actions until William persuades him that the park can be used to spy on the guests. James proceeds to buy out the park and name William as his successor.