For more than 25 years, Netflix has wanted you to sit on the couch and consume movies and series on your living room screen. 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 its first Netflix House in the world this week in King of Prussia, a town located 15 miles from Philadelphia, an entertainment center where visitors can enjoy team games, immersive and gastronomic experiences while shopping for clothes and items from their favorite series and films or playing mini golf.
It’s Monday morning and the workers are still positioning the posters and figurines that decorate the premises. They are finalizing the details of the red carpet and the subsequent party that will be held this afternoon to preview 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 audience and if they can capture their attention,” assures Marian Lee, global marketing director of Netflix, to 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 invited this newspaper to attend the inauguration.
Netflix House is a theme park, the size of a football stadium and spread over two floors, where fans can interact with the characters and visit beyond the screen replicas of the main settings of their favorite series, such as Stranger things, Wednesday, the squid match, Bridgerton OR Love is blind. Features game locations inspired by a dozen of the most successful series and films, such as K-Pop Demon Hunters OR One piece. It includes a shop, a cinema in a giant TUDUM theater and four main attractions: mini golf, escape room, video game arena and an interactive mystery that visitors can solve with their friends.
Among the most evocative settings is the room that Wednesdaythe main character of the series that bears his name, shares the academy with Enid Sinclair Never again. You can see the beds and the large window, from which you can glimpse 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 fairground gaming room, but characterized like the series.
An army of creatives decorates the structures with flowers and images of K-Popthe characters of K-Pop Demon Huntersthe animated film that in just a few months has become the most watched film on Netflix. A gigantic hand like the one that appears in the series Wednesdayinspired by the Addams Family, greets visitors as they descend the evocative red stairs that lead to the engaging play areas. On the other side, figures of The squid game with the characteristic mask of The robbery of money. 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 in which players must solve puzzles and puzzles to move from room to room. Access to Netflix House is free: fans can enter the restaurant and shop for free, but must pay to enjoy any interactive experience.
The company, which began as a mail-order movie rental store, has grown into a giant with more than 301 million subscribers worldwide. This year it expects to earn more than $45 billion, up 16%. It produces and markets its own audiovisual content and offers games onlinelive content, such as WWE boxing matches or NFL games, has bought some iconic cinemas in the United States to broadcast its films and, in recent weeks, has made a bid for Warner Bros. Now it wants to bring entertainment to shopping malls.
The Disney route
Netflix House represents the video on demand platform’s commitment to becoming a major Disney-style entertainment company. Netflix Houses are the equivalent of the creator’s amusement parks Cinderella. First there were films, then he decided to produce his own series House of the Card. This year he debuted in live events with the boxing match between Canelo Álvarez and Terence Crawford, which was the most watched 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 IP for the last 10 years, and you can’t have a strong live experience strategy without the IP to back it up. Other companies in this space have been around for 100 years, so they have a lot of IP 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 believe this is the right time to launch; “We have enough intellectual property to create impactful experiences.”
In recent years, Netflix has organized more than 300 events with fans of its products in 40 cities around the world to experiment with formats that help create connections with the public. “We focus on interaction and generating conversations,” explains Lee. “We need to communicate to our audience that we have a show or a movie that they will love. That they will see something and say: Wow! Or ‘I want to see.'” Frankenstein from Guillermo del Toro this weekend!’. And after I saw it, I texted a friend and said, “Oh my God, you have to see this!” I can’t believe it! It left me feeling nauseous!’ or “That was exciting!” “We want to evoke that emotional connection, because we know that’s the best way to recommend something to your friends and engage them,” he adds. “It’s about bringing content to our fans, seeing how they interact with them and maintaining that two-way communication.”
Netflix House will be a permanent, ever-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 out the glasses to play with their favorite characters. It also has a restaurant whose dishes are inspired by the most popular characters from its audiovisual catalogue. Netflix BITES, as they call the themed restaurant, offers iconic food and drinks with nods to Netflix’s most-watched stories. “It’s a great opportunity for fans to connect with their favorite stories, with creative fare you’ll only find here,” says Greg Lombardo, VP of Experiences at Netflix.
Choosing a site is not free. King of Prussia, a picturesque town of 25,000 people, is located halfway between New York and Washington. In this small city lies the third largest shopping center in the United States, with more than 450 shops. A gigantic commercial space visited by 22 million people a year and with more than 1.1 billion dollars in turnover.
“To build Netflix House we built 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 work 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 films that we have distributed. So we know what will work in different cities. So, we use both the viewing data and the location of the fans and what they say.”
