Inside Netflix House Wednesday and One Piece Experiences in Philly

In order to step foot inside the project that Netflix views as a critical piece of its future, you have to walk through a vestige of its past.

The streaming giant on Monday night christened its first Netflix House, a real-world, physical representation of what it has built for TV. And the grand entrance is a red envelope, which visitors will walk through to get to a grand atrium overflowing with characters and visuals from Netflix’s vast library.

“This big red envelope is symbolic of what we used to do years ago, which was mail DVDs around the United States,” said Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, standing next to co-CEO Greg Peters and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro at the space’s opening ceremony. “What we did, even when the technology was different, is that we build fans, and this Netflix House here is to celebrate the fans.”

The fandom, it turns out, is really the key. It’s something that The Walt Disney Co. and NBCUniversal know well, with their theme parks and experiences businesses becoming primary focus points for their respective strategies.

If you talk to any executive in Disney or Universal’s experiences division (like, say Disney Parks and Experiences chairman Josh D’Amaro, who was a conspicuous presence at Netflix’s upfront event earlier this year) they will tell you that the real-world experiences build a connection with fans of entertainment that goes beyond a love of the storytelling onscreen.

“That’s what drives love for a brand, is that emotional connection,” says Marian Lee, Netflix’s CMO, speaking with The Hollywood Reporter inside Netflix House’s vast Tudum Theater. “I always tell the team that it’s about giving fans a place to have a shared community, and my team reminds me that we’re stewards of the story, so we want to continue the storytelling. You’re coming in, and there are elements that are familiar, but it’s not just the show in a real life setting, it’s elements from that. So the familiarity is there, but as a fan, you can really appreciate where we’re taking it.”

The first Netflix House is located in what used to be a Lord & Taylor, a department store that had been an anchor tenant of the King of Prussia Mall, a short ways outside Philadelphia. Now Netflix is an anchor tenant, with a second location set to open in a similar space in a mall in Dallas, Texas next month. Inside, the two-story venue has the theater, of course, which will host screenings of its films and shows, as well as special events, as well as two massive experience spaces, a nine-hole mini golf course, a virtual reality area, a shop, and a Netflix Bites restaurant, with dishes based on films and shows like KPop Demon Hunters and WWE.

The first two immersive experiences are based on the anime One Piece and the scripted juggernaut Wednesday. One Piece is fundamentally an escape room experience, letting visitors become part of a pirate crew to solve puzzles. Wednesday, meanwhile, transports visitors into the Eve of the Outcasts carnival, complete with a slew of carnival games a “misery-go-round” and a murder mystery to solve, if they can find a secret passage or two.

It’s immersive storytelling at a smaller scale than what you could expect to find at a Disney World, but much more conveniently located, and free to enter (though experiences do require paid tickets). Netflix has experimented with immersive experiences for years, but Netflix House pushes those experiments into what are effectively permanent locations.

“When you start to look at the P and Ls for these experiences, the biggest expense is the real estate cost. And so if you can mitigate that in some way and put more into the development of creative you want to do that right? That’s how we’re oriented at Netflix,” Lee says “So it’s sort of the logical next step for us to get into a permanent venue, because as much as that seems odd, going into a permanent venue gives you more flexibility to change things inside of this space, rather than constantly thinking about, ‘oh, I have to build this, I have to tear it down, I have to move it to another location.’”

After Philly and Dallas, the next Netflix House will open in Las Vegas, which will serve as another learning experience for the company: “Vegas gives us an opportunity to test an audience that is probably churning over every four days,” Lee says, adding that the company may change out the experiences less frequently (plans are fluid, but they expect to cycle through the experiences every year or so).

But the Netflix House also serves as a living, breathing reminder of Netflix’s ability to adapt on the fly.

KPop Demon Hunters is featured throughout the experience, from a giant Derpy in the mall outside the Netflix House entrance, to a ssam bowl and signage in the restaurant, to the mural outside. When guests walk in, they might be greeted with “Golden” blaring over the sound system. But that was all done on the fly. When KPop Demon Hunters took off on the service over the summer, Netflix House construction was in full swing.

“The [mural] artist had already started painting, but we can’t just change the mural,” Lee says. “You have to go to the township, you have to get community approval. You have to do all of that. So they sort of raced on many paths.

“It is a great testament to how quickly Netflix can move,” Lee continued. “So I may be able to pressure the team to do it, but the fact is, at many other places, you’d be locked into a design system that would have no flexibility, and here you can be reactive, and you can react to something that you didn’t anticipate and then deliver what people want. So I don’t think that happens everywhere, because you’re so locked and loaded. So we’ve given ourselves enough flexibility to have things that we think are anchor IP that will continue to drive people to come back and forth, but also to have the move, to have the flexibility and agility to swap in things that we see are starting to work.”

For a company like Netflix, where many of its biggest hits came out of nowhere (KPop Demon Hunters, Squid Game, Bird Box, Drive to Survive), the company is ready and waiting to bring the next big thing to life, and that it carve out its own piece of the experiential entertainment business in the process.