For more than 25 years, Netflix has wanted you to sit on the couch consuming movies and series on the screen in your living room. Now he wants you to go for a walk and come to his house. He wants to be the king of entertainment. To this end, Netflix opens this week in King of Prussia, a small town located 25 kilometers from Philadelphia, its first Netflix House in the world, an entertainment center where visitors can enjoy team games, immersive and gastronomic experiences while shopping for clothes and objects from their favorite series and movies or playing mini golf.
It is Monday morning and the workers are still placing the posters and figures that decorate the premises. They are finalizing the details of the red carpet and the subsequent party that will be held this afternoon to premiere the first Netflix House on the planet. “We want to become the largest entertainment company in the world. That means exploring different areas, testing different strategies and seeing if they work, if they connect with the public and if they manage to capture their attention,” Marian Lee, the global director of Marketing at Netflix, assures EL PAÍS in a joint interview with a small group of journalists. The meeting takes place at the brand new Netflix House, where the company has invited this newspaper to attend the inauguration.
Netflix House is a theme park, the size of a football stadium spread over two floors, where fans can interact with the characters and tour the replicas of the main settings of their favorite series beyond the screen such as Stranger Things, Wednesday, the Squid Game, the Bridgertons o Love is Blind. It features gaming venues inspired by a dozen of the most successful series and movies, such as K-Pop Demon Hunters o One Piece. It includes a store, a cinema in a gigantic TUDUM theater and four main attractions: mini golf, escape room, video game arena and an interactive mystery for visitors to solve with their friends.
Among the most striking settings is the room that Wednesdaythe main character of the series that bears his name, shares with Enid Sinclair in the academy of Nervermore. You can see the beds and the large window, from which you can sense the silhouette of the two protagonists arguing in the middle of a storm, while Enid transforms into a werewolf. The windows open and visitors can access a typical fair game room, but characterized as the series.
An army of creatives decorates the facilities with flowers and images of the K-Popthe characters of K-Pop Demon Huntersthe animated film that has become the film with the most views on Netflix in just a few months. A gigantic hand like the one that appears in the series Wednesdayinspired by the Addams Family, greets visitors as they descend striking red stairs that lead to the immersive gaming venues. On the other side, figures of The Squid Game with the characteristic mask of The Money Heist. A few meters away is access to one of the most fun games: an escape challenge based on One Piece –animated series inspired by a pirate manga that has become a global phenomenon – and where players have to solve enigmas and riddles to move from room to room. Access to Netflix House is free: fans can enter the restaurant and store for free, but have to pay to enjoy any of the interactive experiences.
The company, which started as a video store renting movies by mail, has become a giant with more than 301 million subscribers worldwide. This year it expects to earn more than $45 billion, 16% more. Produces and markets its own audiovisual content, offers games onlinelive content, such as WWE boxing matches or NFL games, has bought some iconic cinemas in the United States to broadcast its own films and, in recent weeks, has made an offer for Warner Bros. Now he wants to bring entertainment to the mall.
The Disney path
Netflix House represents the video-on-demand platform’s commitment to becoming a large Disney-style entertainment company. The Netflix Houses are the equivalent of the amusement parks of the creator of the Cinderella. First there were movies, then he decided to produce his own series with House of Card. This year it debuted in live events with the boxing match between Canelo Álvarez and Terence Crawford, which has been the most followed boxing match on television with 41 million views.
Lee, sitting at a roundtable of seven journalists, sums it up: “Netflix has only been investing in original intellectual property for the last 10 years, and you can’t really have a strong live experience strategy without intellectual property to back it up. Other companies in this space have been around for 100 years, so they have a ton of intellectual property to build on. We’ve only been in this business for 10 years and we have Stranger Things and the Bridgertonor now we have K-pop Demon Hunters. Based on everything we’ve done so far, we feel this is the right time to launch; “We have enough intellectual properties to create impactful experiences.”
In recent years, Netflix has held more than 300 events with fans of its products in 40 cities around the world to experiment with formats that help create bonds with the public. “We focus on interaction and generating conversation,” explains Lee. “We must convey to our audience that we have a series or movie that they are going to love. That they are going to see something and say: Wow! Or ‘I want to see Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro this weekend!’. And after seeing it, I wrote to a friend and said, ‘Oh my God, you have to see it! I can’t believe it! It left me nauseous!’ or ‘It was exciting!’ “We want to evoke that emotional connection, because we know that’s the best way for you to recommend something to your friends and get them hooked,” he adds. “It’s about offering content to our fans, seeing how they interact with them, and maintaining that two-way communication.”
Netflix House will be a permanent and constantly evolving installation that will be updated periodically throughout the year, so each visit will offer something new, its creators explain. It also offers immersive experiences with virtual reality (VR) technology where visitors can try glasses to play with their favorite characters. It also has a restaurant whose dishes are inspired by the most popular characters in its audiovisual catalogue. Netflix BITES, as they call the themed restaurant, offers iconic food and drinks with nods to Netflix’s most followed stories. “It’s a great opportunity for fans to connect with their favorite stories, with creative dishes that you will only find here,” says Greg Lombardo, vice president of Experiences at Netflix.
Choosing a site is not free. King of Prussia, a picturesque town of 25,000 people, is halfway between New York and Washington. In this small city stands the third largest shopping center in the United States, with more than 450 stores. A gigantic commercial space visited by 22 million people a year and with more than 1.1 billion dollars in sales.
“To build Netflix House we based ourselves on what we know is popular locally,” says Lee. “When we think about what we’ve seen in different cities around the world, we know, based on audience data, what works and what doesn’t in different cities,” he adds. “We have some audience data that, for example, shows that Korean content is very popular in Latin America. These are things that we know, and we also have information on the fan activations that we have done for the series and movies that we have released. So we know what is going to work in different cities. Therefore, we use both the viewing data and the location of the fans and what they say.”