Netflix has opened its first Netflix House experience centre at the outskirts of Philadelphia offering escape rooms, mini-golf, a fan shop, a cinema and a restaurant.
Located in the Philadelphia edge city called King of Prussia, Netflix House is all about experiences tied to the streaming giant’s programming.
The escape rooms draw on the anime pirate story “One Piece”, while each mini-golf hole is themed to a different series from “Bridgerton” to “Stranger Things”.
The largest space is devoted to “Wednesday”. Timed with the launch of the second season of the Addams Family spin-off, visitors can stroll through a gloomy fairground with mini-games and solve a puzzle.
The starting point is a detailed reconstruction of Wednesday Addams’s room at the boarding school Nevermore Academy.
There are also VR experiences where visitors, using special headsets and other equipment, can step into the worlds of “Squid Game” and “Stranger Things”.
Competing for your time and attention
Netflix says it’s moving towards the mark of 1 billion viewers worldwide. Marketing chief Marian Lee sees the platform in constant competition for attention, with rival streaming platforms like YouTube and TikTok, as well as video games.
The solution, she says, is to stay in the conversation and stand out from the competition. She added that Netflix hopes visitors who have not seen a series might be inspired to watch it after visiting an attraction.
Two more Netflix Houses in the United States have already been announced. They are part of a strategy to build a bridge from the screen to reality and let fans experience the worlds of its series and films.
Disney shows, 75 years after opening its first park in California, how much money is in the idea: The group’s theme parks and cruises generated more than $27 billion in revenue and delivered an operating profit of just over $8 billion in the first nine months of the current financial year.
Netflix and the King of Prussia
By comparison, Netflix is starting small and in an unglamorous setting. The first Netflix House occupies two floors of a former department store space in a shopping centre. It is not in Philadelphia proper but at the outskirts, in King of Prussia, named after an eighteenth-century inn.
To decide which series fit an attraction, Netflix uses viewing figures and also considers what is popular at each location, Lee said. If something does not work as intended, the layout can be adjusted and areas reallocated.
Netflix opted to sell tickets for individual experiences rather than a single park-style entry. Mini-golf is the cheapest at $15 per round, VR experiences cost $25, and the escape rooms and the “Wednesday” fairground are $39 each, with around an hour to spend in them.
There have been no announcements on international expansion, but “maybe soon,” said Netflix executive Lee. She expects that if the first locations succeed there will be more Netflix Houses, including in other countries.
