If they get good prices for the location, I think this is actually a really good idea.
Most of the time, you are a hot topic selling stranger things shit. Whatever. Buy some shit for your kids.
But when something like tiger king or squid game or whatever becomes a cultural hit? Just look at how every single big youtuber tried to do a “real life squid game” event. People will love to go to an “escape room” style situation where you spend an evening playing a live action video game. And you likely cover the profits for the entire year in a few weeks.
I went to the Stranger Things popup in Vegas. Not gonna lie, I had a good time. It was like an amusement park exhibit with the classic gift shop at the end, but the prices didn’t seem inflated. If I was interested in buying merch, I’d rather go to to one of these than just order it online. I’m not saying it will be successful, but I don’t hate them for trying it.
Makes sense. They have multiple franchises and they can either sell in Walmart and water down the franchise or make an exclusive store where they control the experience and increase the value of the products. Disney also has stores like that. As for the Squid Game experience it’s the local equivalent to Disney parks. Di’s I mention it looks like they’re copying Disney?
Same, but Disney has gotten so big and so loose with it’s cash that they are burning the clothes off their backs to keep the train moving. It was just not profitable enough to keep that arm alive I guess
The entire chain of Disney stores in the UK closed years ago. A bunch of other narrowly branded shops have gone too.
If the likes of Disney didn’t think stores were worth it, I’m not sure how Netflix thinks it could work. There’s can be decent margin on merchandise, but also a lot of cost in running physical retail.
No. Merch has direct profit that has a much larger margin than streaming. It’s just a new cash flow for them. Same reason patreon was offering merch and discord too.
You have an asset in land and physical goods to sell for money. It’s not complicated why they are pivoting to it.
In Tokyo they had a Stranger Things themed restaurant for a while. Pop up culture is pretty big in Japan so it worked out great I suppose. I don’t expect it to work in other places nearly as well. Especially if it’s a permanent structure.
I mean the spaceships in star trek, star wars and firefly all have pretty different interiors. Of your idea is to draw in fans of specific shows you don’t really want to have a “generic sci fi” setting.
Well, yeah you wouldn’t be able to re-use everything but certain things like the building structure and cutlery, flooring, etc probably wouldn’t have to be modified much. Some of the more expensive things to switch out.
To be fair I would rather see them try to make money for investors this way than by cutting costs on labor and the other shady things companies do to make money. This is at least some kind of “innovation” for lack of a better term. Maybe it might be cool
Yeah, increasing profit by actually creating a product is great. Increasing profit by increasing costs to the customer or decreasing expenditures (in particular cutting pay or removing employees) sucks.
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