Room Escape Artist

It took a while, but we finally made a trip to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, to visit the East Coast outpost of Netflix House: Netflix’s in-person venue that serves as a hybrid restaurant, immersive venue, mini-golf, gift shop, and movie theater.

I am genuinely excited to see major media companies recognize that immersive experiences are a great way to engage fans, and I was curious to see what that felt like in practice.

What I found was in some ways better than what I was expecting, in other ways worse… but mostly I found myself deeply confused by some of the choices that Netflix has made with this offering. More than anything, I have found Netflix House exceptionally interesting.

Netflix Bits, The Gift Shop, and the Movie Theater

Before we dig into the immersive side of this, which is by far the most interesting part of this (and my focus), I do want to briefly look at the rest of the venue.

Netflix Bites

The restaurant was good enough. It was competent mall food at what felt like inflated prices… but who even knows anymore? Every time I step out of my home I feel like money spills out of me like rings from Sonic the Hedgehog.

I was expecting (hoping?) that the restaurant was going to offer more of an experience. Eleven’s Waffles, Sanji’s Potato Pallie… I’m spitballing here with next to no effort. It felt like more could have happened here. The food was enjoyable enough, but I truly expected more.

The Gift Shop

The gift shop was very cute, and had merch that held precisely zero appeal to me (but I’ll fully admit that my taste in merch is almost never reflected in what’s available anywhere). Still, I found it amusing to peruse.

While the phrase “exit through the gift shop” has become a bit of a cliché, Netflix House leveled up this concept by placing the gift shop in the center of the venue. All paths lead through the gift shop. I can’t say that it was enjoyable, especially at busier times of day when people entering and exiting the mall were navigating the cramped aisles plopped down in the middle of their path of egress. If you had asked me whether this was advisable or up to code, I would have guessed not. But I have precisely zero desire to dig into this further. If I know anything about major malls in the United States, it’s that they do get visits from fire inspectors, and this is very much up to their discretion.

The Movie Theater

There was a movie theater that had a visible schedule of when it would play popular Netflix content. We didn’t venture into this place.

I mention it because it was there… and whenever I said to someone from outside of the immersive community that “we were going to Netflix House” they thought that I was going to a movie theater that was playing Netflix content. The quizzical “but don’t you have Netflix at home?” responses felt like foreshadowing of some deeper realizations that I would soon come to.

Netflix House Immersives

We’re finally at the main event. The immersive experiences within Netflix House are the thing that justifies the incredible square-footage of this endeavor. I truly had no idea what to expect going in. I deliberately did no research other than knowing that there were experiences built around Wednesday and Stranger Things.

Wednesday

Going into this experience, I had watched Season 1 of Wednesday with my parents, and I found it enjoyable enough, but not something that was going to seek out more on my own. I knew the characters, the setting, and the vibe more than well-enough. I also learned that we were visiting on the final weekend of this experience’s run, and that it would soon be replaced by a K-Pop Demon Hunters experience.

With that in mind, I was pleasantly surprised by the world of the Wednesday experience. We were pulsed into the world through a well-executed intro sequence set in Wednesday’s dorm room. From that intro, our wave of guests was unleashed on a much larger world.

Netflix House created a carnival midway with the glibly sullen black aesthetic of the show’s main character. I was shocked by how expansive the space was, and liked the re-themed carnival games.

Front and center was a light puzzle and scavenger hunt to unravel a mystery at the school. Upon finishing that sequence of puzzles, we learned that there were two more. One easier, the other harder.

These puzzle trails were competent and enjoyable. Everything worked. The solves were clean and clear. These were made by professionals. I could tell by the precision of the puzzle design. The biggest struggle for us was a cast member who was a little too eager to casually hint us, and simply gave away the puzzle we were actively solving. That moment aside, however, the performers were engaged, energetic, and a delight to interact with.

My core observation of the puzzle content within Wednesday was that as professional as it was, it felt like it was bolted on at the end as an afterthought. It seemed like someone woke up near the end of the project, realized that it was way too thin, and said, “CALL IN THE PUZZLE NERDS!” And the puzzle nerds descended, adding teeny, tiny additions that wouldn’t upset a creative director to an already designed world. Then they spun up a Twilio account and tied it all together with an SMS-based interface. They wrote some text messages in-character to make the puzzles feel like a story, and shipped it.

No judgement for the designers… it’s exactly the kind of low friction, moderate impact solution that I would roll out if my back were against a wall. Nevertheless, I liked my time in Wednesday enough, while still feeling like the main event in this space was at best, a second class citizen in the design process.

Stranger Things: The Immersive Experience

Stranger Things, on the other hand, is a show that I’ve been in on from the very beginning. I loved it at the start, and liked it at the finale. I didn’t loath the conclusion like many others… but I do feel like the sun has set on my relationship with Stranger Things.

Side Note: We don’t all need to have lifelong relationships with content. It’s fine that Ninja Turtles meant the absolute world to 4 year-old me. I’ll always have that joy without needing to continue caring about it. The fact that I don’t care about current incarnations doesn’t rob me of anything and it doesn’t “ruin my childhood.” It’s healthy and normal to retain your positive memories and move on. Moving on.

Stranger Things: The Immersive Experience was a show pretending to be a game. My take on this one is complicated.

Both of these things are true at the same time:

1. Stranger Things: The Immersive Experience was beautifully constructed and technically impressive.
2. Stranger Things: The Immersive Experience was profoundly boring and never missed an opportunity to tell me how I was supposed to feel instead of actually making me feel that feeling.

The set design and and effects in this show were great. Truly.

The presence of the “kids” from Stranger Things was great… although I felt like the quality of their performances varied heavily.

One Last Side Note: It was a ton of fun seeing actor Bob Glouberman appear in this show. Bob was an early and inventive escape room creator in Los Angeles. He’s also an actor who randomly shows up absolutely everywhere either playing a doctor or a lawyer. No one has ever been more typecast as “seeming like they have a professional degree.” In this instance he played a doctor. Tragically, his role seemed a bit vestigial. He showed up and died. (Was some material cut?) Still, it always makes me smile when he shows up in things.

Where Stranger Things fell short was in its faux-gameplay. The audience was broken up into 3 groups. Each group was told that we had different psychic powers, and that we could activate them by striking a particular pose. The show asked us to do this a lot… and at no point did it matter.

It felt like we were the little sibling who wasn’t capable of playing the video game, so our older sibling gave us a controller that wasn’t plugged in… and we knew it. This felt so hollow.

Additionally, the Stranger Things cast kept talking to us about “friendship” but there was absolutely nothing in this experience that allowed us to even pretend that we had built any type of relationship to these characters. They talked at us and each other and we struck meaningless poses. Stranger things happened. But I felt closer to these characters watching the show than I did in the experience.

Also, this was sold as an hour-long experience, but it barely lasted 45 minutes.

Top 9 Mini-Golf

Top 9 Mini-Golf was a heavily automated, score-based 9-hole mini-golf game. Each hole was set against a different show on Netflix.

In my opinion, this was the strongest offering at Netflix House… but it was uneven.

Some holes like Is It Cake, The Floor is Lava, and Squid Game beautifully evoked the shows. These were inspired designs.

Holes like Bridgerton, Wednesday, Love is Blind, and Stranger Things felt like very normal, interchangable holes that happened to have a theme.

Then there was the WWE hole that felt like the kind of big swing that should have died in brainstorming… or the One Piece hole that I am 99% sure was just a generic pirate mini-golf hole that was purchased and had a Straw-Hat jolly roger hung over it.

The holes all worked, the automated score-keeping was great and kept things moving… but I found myself wishing that the whole endeavor demonstrated the love, care, and creative translation of Is It Cake, The Floor is Lava, and Squid Games. Whomever worked on those should be really proud of themselves. Beautiful work.

A Question of Strategy & Intent

At this point, I think that I’d comfortably call my experience at Netflix House a mixed bag. On a creative and execution level, there’s some great stuff happening, and it’s also undercut by who knows what? Making experiences on this scale is complicated and it’s difficult to tell where in the chain things are getting tripped up.

At least outwardly, nothing that I have described is an abject failure… which is admirable in an operation of this scale run by a company like Netflix, which is operating outside of its normal category. Immersive is hard. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I want to dig a little deeper and look at what we can tell about the strategy and intent of Netflix House, as well as look at where this could go from here.

This Expensive

I really can’t go any further without talking about price. A day at Netflix House doing essentially everything that it had to offer is expensive. In our case, we spent $497.40 for 3 people ($165.80 per person).

Breakdown per person:

• On average $45.65 per immersive experience
• Mini golf – $22
• Lunch with drinks – $52.50

That’s not counting gas, which is currently in dystopian levels… and we didn’t avail ourselves of the gift shop.

This put the price north of a day in a Disney Park, which is bonkers.

Granted, you don’t have to do this all at once, especially if you’re a local. However, we drove a couple of hours for the privilege, and felt like Netflix House was siphoning money out of our wallet throughout our time there. At no point did Netflix House do anything to reward us for having committed to doing everything that they had to offer. This felt completely unreasonable, and it’s a serious hurdle to returning.

Pipeline Depth

Netflix has made some great shows, and some of them have been big hits. But how many of these can really sustain a $45 ticket to an immersive experience?

They’ve already done Squid Games, One Piece, Wednesday, Stranger Things, and K-Pop Demon Hunters.

Sure, Netflix has other shows that have been hits, but I don’t really see them pulling off large scale immersive experiences for House of Cards, Tiger King, Queen’s Gambit, Red Notice, Don’t Look Up, Adolescence, Bridgerton, Love is Blind, or Is It Cake.

Yes, Netflix does have hits come out of nowhere like the aforementioned K-Pop Demon Hunters, but that is inherently unpredictable. As I understand it, K-Pop Demon Hunters‘ success was something of a surprise. Plus, I cannot imagine how fast they had to work to turn that production around quickly. There’s always a tax to working fast. You either sacrifice quality or spend a ton of money.

I guess that it’s possible for them to start building around other licensed material, but that feels like a contractual and approvals rats nest.

It seems like they are in a tough place from a pipeline standpoint. While I am certain that they could revisit Squid Games, One Piece, Wednesday, Stranger Things, and K-Pop Demon Hunters in different ways, I have to wonder how many times can they keep returning to the same well?

Time In Market & Marketing

I have no clue what Netflix House spends to develop a single experience, but I’d bet big that they don’t have a streamlined process, nor a stable team designing and deploying these experiences.

With that in mind, I have to question the rate that they are cycling experiences through a venue. I haven’t paid close-enough attention to this to have hard numbers, but it feels like an individual experience should be able to stay put for at least a few years, if properly marketed… and I don’t think that these experiences are properly marketed.

Where are the advertisements for these experiences in Netflix? Why does it feel like very few people know that Netflix House exists or that there are these experiences for beloved shows that you can go live? I don’t know what their ticket sales are, but the rate of experience churn and the price point suggest to me that they aren’t pulling in enough guests.

Also, Wednesday and Stranger Things: The Immersive Experience were completely different, structurally. And I’ve heard that the experience for One Piece was another structure entirely. That’s impressive, but also confusing. Where was the marketing around this? Where was the clarity and proper expectation setting?

While I haven’t addressed it, I am aware that Netflix House has a location in Dallas, Texas, with a new location coming to Las Vegas, Nevada, soon. So I imagine that they are trying to live the dream of moving experiences between locations, but that’s generally a dream. Moving experiences is so much tougher to pull off than it seems. And it’s expensive.

It’s always better to let an experience grow roots, keep it maintained, and do the marketing work. Maybe they are, and I’m wrong… but I doubt it.

Commitment

All of this leaves me wondering if Netflix will really commit to in-person experiences for the long haul. Can they build an in-person identity, a “Netflix magic” of sorts? Do they have the product pipeline? Will they pull in the customers? Is there a more sensible pricing structure? And have they cultivated the in-house talent that they will need to thrive in this space?

I want them to. It would be incredible if Netflix was a permanent player in this space. There’s visible potential in Netflix House, but the cracks are just as visible as the potential.

A lot of people in our Patreon community have asked me about Netflix House over the past few years. Upon returning home, I created a single “travelogue” video for this adventure. My hot takes. (This is a lesser known perk that our Patreon backers get to enjoy periodically when we travel.) But a short video wasn’t enough. This extra long analysis is dedicated to all of the folks who make our work possible.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Michael J.J. Tiffany, Daniel Rothhaar, and Kyle Glavey-Weiss

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

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