Netflix House marks streaming giant’s first theme park

Philadelphia - After years of temporary pop-up events, streaming giant Netflix will make its first foray into the theme park space this week, rivalling entertainment giants Disney and Universal Studios.

The company’s Netflix House theme park will open its doors on Nov 12 at the King of Prussia mall – one of the largest shopping centres in the US, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – in a space measuring over 100,000 sq ft.

The theme park, which will have free admission, plans to host a wide range of dining and activities, all decorated to resemble some of the platform’s most popular shows and movies, including Bridgerton, Stranger Things, Squid Game and KPop Demon Hunters.

Netflix chief marketing officer Marian Lee said the company opted against charging for admission because “we wanted that accessibility. We want to be an everyday destination”.

“As we were launching these pop-up experiences, it became clear that we would actually have more flexibility if we had a permanent location,” she told AFP in an interview.

Additional Netflix House locations are set to open after the Pennsylvania attraction, with one in Dallas, Texas, scheduled to debut on Dec 11 and a third on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada by 2027.

“Las Vegas is a very different space. It’s not inside a shopping centre, but it is on the Strip... and so there, we will programme it a little bit differently,” Ms Lee said.

Although Ms Lee did not confirm the costs to build these theme parks, she said: “You can see it’s a huge capital investment for the company to invest in both the space and like all the finishings and the fabrications of everything.”

Ms Lee said that right now, there are no plans to build a Netflix House internationally. “We’d have to think about it in a different way,” she said. AFP