Live And Immersive Is The Next Frontier For Fan-Favorite Franchises

Never mind the fading NFT gold rush. These days, musicians, moviemakers, artists and others in media and entertainment are exploring ever more ways to maximize the value of creative work, especially those with franchise-level properties that can give their most devoted fans more ways to completely immerse themselves in beloved worlds.

That’s part of what’s driven Netflix’sNFLX
latest big franchise-building swing, The Gray Man, the Russo Brothers’ $200 million action spy thriller based on a best-selling series of books that hit theaters last weekend and debut on the streamer later this week. It’s also behind the streamer’s high-profile move into video gaming, where it has already debuted multiple titles connected to its powerhouse Stranger Things franchise.

Separately, the streaming giant has commissioned traveling virtual-reality experiences for Zach Snyder’s zombie franchise, Army of the Dead. It partnered with eight-year-old live-event specialist Fever for The Stranger Things Drive-Into Experience, and commissioned Fever and Secret Cinema to create a “secret ball” immersive live experience built around Bridgerton. Secret Cinema also created a live immersive experience for the Netflix/Riot Games animated hit Arcane, based on the popularr video game League of Legends.

Games and VR extensions remain hot areas for spinoffs, with the Metaverse and Web3 beckoning as a future mashup of both and other virtual technologies. But right now, any big media, music, artistic or even corporate franchise with a fan base should be thinking far more widely, especially as live events and experiences rebound from the pandemic’s depredations.

Fever is one prominent example of the investment capital coming into the immersive live event sector, raising $227 million from a Goldman Sachs-led group of investors. Other deep pockets are circling the sector as well, sensing opportunity for a potentially huge next tranche of live experiences and venues, leveraging big franchises with wide commercial appeal.

Long-time TV producer Caryn Mandabach (The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Third Rock from the Sun) may have wrapped production on Netflix’s Peaky Blinders after six celebrated seasons. But the pungent tale of Tommy Shelby and his criminal family in 1920s England will live on, and not just in a planned movie.

Among the post-streaming brand extensions planned for Peaky: a VR experience, a not-too-surprising branded whiskey, and a totally unexpected ballet(!). A future experience that ties together some of the virtual world’s look and interactivity, the live performance of ballet, and, absolutely, some of that whiskey, seems like an logical next step.

Mandabach acknowledged on a recent Variety podcast that she has no idea how much money these various initiatives will generate. She’s just feeding new experiences to a fan base that loves the Shelby clan and its long-ago world.

“You get a sense of how meaningful it is to people and you honor that and whether or not it’s remunerative, to be honest, it’s never happened to me before,” Mandabach said. “I have no idea.”

The opportunities are just as big in music, whose revenues have finally climbed past peaks last seen more than a decade ago. Now, as music becomes a key part of social media, movies (think Kate Bush and Metallica’s revived ‘80s hits on Stranger Things 4), games and more, the industry is branching out, said Dmitri Vietze, director of this fall’s Music Tectonics conference and a long-time industry publicist.

“There’s this beacon of culture that was music,” consumed in relatively traditional ways, from concerts to radio to streaming audio, Vietze said. “But for some fans, there are these other experiences: social media, video, gaming stuff, Web3, NFT stuff. We’re seeing different ways that people are experiencing music. There’s an opportunity for those bands to present their art, to have different experiences. Overall, where is culture going, and how do they fit into that?”

Spotify Head of Innovation and Market Intelligence Mauhan Zonoozy, who will keynote the Music Tectonics conference, said the new tech-enabled experiences are transforming the industry in many different directions.

“I don’t think I’ve been more excited about the music industry than today because of the experimentation” with various tech-empowered experiences, Zonoozy said. “I think right now music is at this inflection point of demanding innovation, powered by technology. Lot of disruptors are coming up the value chain. I think its health, not speaking dollars, but thematically, it’s in great shape.”

As it is, music is a crucial part of the immersive live events now popping up across the country, and likely to be even more central in the future, executives said.

Both Fever and the joint venture of Lighthouse Entertainment and Impact Museums have hosted immersive live events in numerous U.S. and Canadian cities the past couple of years, featuring deep dives on artists such as Van Gogh and Monet, backed with custom music and other audio.

The combination can be massively popular; Lighthouse’s Immersive Van Gogh was one of last year’s most popular live events of any kind, selling more than 5 million tickets. Coming to numerous cities this summer are dueling King Tut immersive experiences.

Lighthouse Immersive CEO Corey Ross told ArtNet News that one part of the huge appeal of Immersive Van Gogh was its novelty, taking the experience of art in a transformative new direction.

“I have been experiencing art in art galleries since childhood and the presentation has more or less stayed the same—paintings on the walls with labels,” said Ross, who also is executive producer of a recent traveling Banksy exhibition. “The public is extremely curious to experience a new genre, and once they have seen it done well, they love it.”

The future of such events will likely move past the relatively straightforward projection-mapping technologies of Immersive Van Gogh to include more ways to connect and interact. For one thing, expect far more experiences based on more recent creative talents, intellectual property, and franchises, across a broad range of genres.

Impact Museums’ Head of Studio Jenny Weinbloom said her organization is developing numerous original and licensed immersive experiences, built on genres such as social-impact issues, music and children’s content, among much else.

“First comes the story, the next step is what’s the right medium to tell that story,” Weinbloom said. “Increasingly, interactivity is a component of everything. I try to remember what I love more than anything in the world is interactivity. For me, I want a fellow human to take me by the hand and lead me on an adventure.”

Weinbloom has been part of immersive, interactive live experiences for a dozen years, beginning with helping bring Punchdrunk’s early MacBeth-based Sleep No More to the United States.

More recently, Weinbloom was executive producer on art collective Meow Wolf ‘s vast Convergence Station, a five-story-high immersive experience located near downtown Denver’s NFL stadium. Other past projects included experiential marketing events for liquor and automotive brands, and theme-park experiences on multiple continents for big entertainment brands. Now she’s considering how to make the music of beloved musicians come alive in new ways for their fans.

“I’m looking at a (musical) artist’s body of work, and their story,” Weinbloom said. “You’re a legacy artist of a certain stature. You need to have your immersive experience. But what that looks like is unique for each artist.”

Disney, of course, has long exploited the synergies possible with popular characters and narrative universes, dating back to Walt himself. More recently, the company included a series of Star Wars-focused experiences on its newest cruise ship, the Disney Wish.

Among other extravagances, the company sells a $5,000 cocktail in the ship’s Star Wars-themed Hyperspace Lounge, though it’s worth noting the pricey tipple also comes with both wine from and physical access to the vineyard on George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch.

Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson has moved recently into a far less blocky and more hybridized live experience called .party(), an “experiential nightclub concept” for 1,8000 attendees at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The project created by Production Club overlaid a sci-fi story line, the immersion of the Metaverse, gamification, laser light shows, projection-mapping technology, and lots of live music to transform the historic stadium.

Production Club CEO Corey Johnson told Fast Company, “the Metaverse doesn’t offer human connection. At the end of the day, people love to be slammed into a room together. I think grounding the experience in the physical, then extending it into the digital, is what we’re aiming for.”

In the future, several executives said that musicians, artists, movie and TV makers, even big brands should be routinely taking advantage of a far wider array of tech-enabled live and hybrid experiences to entice and engage their fans in ways that legacy media can’t really duplicate.

Just as importantly, said Spotify’s Zonoozy, is the ability to connect fans to each other, creating a much more sophisticated and engaging web of interactivity and community connection.

“What that next generation of creators does is about not just fan to artist, but fan to fan,” Zonoozy said. “There’s a web of cultural presences and curation that lies across that map.”

So it still comes back to human interaction, just manifesting in so many more different ways than ever before possible.

Production Club CEO Corey Johnson told Fast Company, “the Metaverse doesn’t offer human connection. At the end of the day, people love to be slammed into a room together. I think grounding the experience in the physical, then extending it into the digital, is what we’re aiming for.”