There’s an industrial hydraulic machine in London’s Docklands that breathes in and out and has eyelids that flutter even when no one is looking. It took 18 months and more than $1 million to build, and according to Michael Orsino, senior vice president of events group Cityneon, it’s absolutely no robot.
“We refer to them as creatures, even internally when we have meetings,” says Orsino. “They really come alive, so we try to stay away from calling them robots.” This blinking, breathing robot is a dinosaur — it stomps and roars in the finale of Jurassic World: The Exhibition, an immersive experience based on the film franchise. A ‘keepalive’ system means the dinosaurs in the show move silently, even when no one is around, “because we always want them to feel like they’re present”.
There are currently four Jurassic World exhibitions around the world – London’s is the latest, a 20,000 square foot human-created jungle at the ExCeL centre, which opened in August. Eight miles away, in Soho, there is a dinner that calls for a narrator and an interval. At the Monarch Theater in Park Row’s Batman-themed restaurant, guests dine on 10 courses based on DC Comics characters – the experience includes smoke machines, levitating dishes and the occasional magic trick.
Reality TV … Stranger Things: The Experience in London. Photo: David M Bennett/Dave Bennett/Getty Images for Fever
Welcome to the age of immersion. Dinosaurs and DC are barely scratching the surface – this summer also saw the launch of Stranger Things and Tomb Raider ‘experiences’ in London, I’m A Celebrity Jungle Challenge in Manchester and an Alice in Wonderland ‘immersive cocktail experience’ in Sheffield.
By September, fans were able to stream Squid Game on Netflix at Immersive Gamebox venues in London, Essex and Manchester. In the coming weeks, London will also host an experience based on the Saw horror franchise, while Cheshire will see thousands visit Harry Potter: The Forbidden Forest Experience. And that’s without mentioning the boom in immersive art experiences, the latest of which – Frameless – has just opened in central London.
“The buzzword that everyone will tell you is fascinatingly interactive,” says Orsino. “You hear that all the time.” With a small number of franchises dominating the cultural landscape, it seems like everyone gets their own mini-Disneyland. But why are we suddenly obsessed with stepping on screen? In an increasingly dark world, are we looking for an escape from reality? Is this a balm for the infantilized, paralyzed by property prices in a state of perpetual adolescence? Or do we just want loads of great photos for Instagram?
Mini-Disneyland … Tomb Raider Escape. Photo: WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy
“It’s really driven by the desire to find new ways to connect with our members and fans around the world,” said Greg Lombardo, head of live experiences at Netflix. The streaming service lost almost a million subscribers between April and July this year after subscription fees rose by £1 a month. The company appears to be diversifying its income – tickets for Stranger Things: The Experience cost £52 per person, £62 on Saturday.
“We really wanted to offer people a chance to feel like the characters in this story, that they have the powers,” says Lombardo. Guests are split into different colored teams and assigned a hand gesture that they can use to smash cans from a distance, unlock doors and fight monsters as they tour Stranger Things-inspired sets. The experience includes exclusive footage of the show’s cast (Millie Bobby Brown is apparently contractually obligated to say, “Blue Band, you’re strong”), as well as live actors interacting with the audience.
“You can’t plan it, you don’t hide behind a script,” says Andrea Iohannis, a 30-year-old actor in the experience. “Keep you on your toes.” Some audience members are super fans who want to interact, while others are trying to catch Johannes — since Stranger Things is set in the 1980s, she has to pretend she’s not knows mobile phones. Johannes says the compelling events have been a “blessing” for the actors since the pandemic. “Here we are all together and it’s time to play and be creative.”
Life finds a way…Jurassic World. Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
For many, being visited by a telescope pretending to be a scientist, magician or dinosaur guide is a living nightmare, so why do more and more people seem to be looking for it? Lombardo says the Stranger Things experience appeals to all ages, while guests at The Queen’s Ball — a party based on the hit Netflix series Bridgerton — are 87 percent female, ages 18-45. Lombardo calls it “prom for adults” — attendees join fan-created Facebook groups to discuss how to prepare for the event.
“Before the pandemic, we were seeing a real appetite for real-life experiences. I think it was only promoted during the lockdown,” Lombardo says. “I think people crave moments of community.”
Elizabeth Cohen is a professor of communication at West Virginia University who studies audience reactions to different types of media. She says fans have always wanted to enter fictional worlds, but the internet has allowed their voices to be heard. “I think the Internet has made ‘nerds’ more mainstream,” she says. “And what’s massive is also more profitable.”
Cohen says immersion is psychologically satisfying because people connect with others, relieve stress and become creative. Just like we can watch and play sports at the same time, Cohen says we can now watch and play shows. Does this mean we are big babies? “Sports fans often go to great lengths to dress up to support their team, to get their face painted, to collect memorabilia,” says Cohen. “But I’ve never heard anyone suggest that sports fandom is infantilizing, so why is there a pop culture double standard?”
James Bulmer, creator of Batman restaurant Park Row and CEO of immersive group Wonderland, says, “I built this whole business to preserve my childhood.” Bulmer, former CEO of Fat Duck Group and head of licensing for Disney, got the idea for his company when he passed a film premiere in Leicester Square. “I felt like these wonderful fans had nowhere to immerse themselves in the world that they all believed really existed,” he says.
Bulmer “wanted to create places that allow you to put your daily stress behind you and immerse yourself in the most powerful emotion you have: nostalgia.” He says a “large percentage” of customers are millennials, and they’re willing “to pay a little more to get a much deeper experience’.
The Park Row tasting menu costs £195 per person prepaid. Guests enjoy dishes like hibiscus-covered ox tongue while screens pay homage to the comics. Much of this, naturally, is meant to be photographed and shared. When you enjoy “Liquid Nitrogen Meringue Popcorn” that makes your breath smoke, diners are told it looks “very cool on video.”
I’m not being cynical when I say that everyone is only worried about what they get back on their phones
Visit each immersive experience and you should be ready to show off on a stranger’s cam. “We’ve seen it firsthand, this desire to take pictures of everything,” says Bulmer, referring to the restaurant’s TikTok, which has 10.7 million views.
“I’m not being cynical in saying that everyone’s only worried about what they’re getting back on their phones,” says David Hutchinson, CEO of The Path Entertainment Group, the company behind Saw: The Experience. “Social media is a huge part of our lives.”
Will Dean, CEO of Immersive Gamebox, says punters leave with a “curated gif” of their experience. For £34 you wear a visor equipped with motion sensors and take on the challenges presented in the Squid Game in a box with wall screens. Dean says it’s opening 80 new units in the US and UK next year; many of them are in shopping malls. “We all know that department stores don’t drive pedestrians anymore,” Dean says; restaurateur Bulmer says he planned to “completely disrupt the high street”.
In 2021, almost 50 shops a day closed in the UK, while one in five nightclubs closed in the past three years. Last year The Path Entertainment Group opened an immersive Monopoly experience in an old Paperchase store on Tottenham Court Road; are planning to open Saw in an old nightclub. “Post-Covid, there’s a lot of high street vacancy that we wouldn’t have been able to get close to before,” says Hutchinson.
Millions have been invested in immersion, but some experiences are rougher than others. Many last for an hour – meaning the prices seem extortionate when you consider that a day ticket to Disneyland Paris can cost as little as £50. It remains to be seen whether they will attract repeat customers or quickly become associated with the forced entertainment of work meetings and first dates.
The precedent for all of this is the 15-year-old immersive film experience Secret Cinema; in 2019, the company took £8 million to screen Casino Royale. However, the pandemic has dented the company’s profits, with turnover falling by more than 60% between 2019 and 2020. Last month, ticketing firm TodayTix bought Secret Cinema for $100m (£88m) and announced plans to expanded globally, looking for permanent locations in London, LA and New York. All this despite the fact that Secret Cinema has never made an annual profit.
Lockdowns may no longer shut down live events, but we’re in a cost-of-living crisis now, and the appetite for immersion may be waning.
Or maybe the spiraling inflation will only increase the desire to set foot on the screen. “If you think about shows like Stranger Things or Bridgerton, they’re escapist stories,” says Lombardo. “They allow us to momentarily forget things that may be more challenging in our…
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