Immersive entertainment is here to stay
By Jon Faris, Director, AMS Planning & Research
Immersive entertainment is here to stay, it’s growing exponentially, and it exists in communities across the United States and the world. The team at AMS Planning & Research has been tracking this activity for several years now. In this article, we’ll explore the growth of the sector over two decades as well as outline the importance of venue owners and operators understanding what it takes to present and produce immersive entertainment.
Like many other parts of our business, ‘immersive’ has its own convenings, experts, major players, and recent converts. It crosses over from live to augmented reality (AR) to virtual reality (VR). It’s present in the performing arts and the visual arts, in both the commercial and not-for-profit sectors. Recent AMS calculations put the total market size at $470.9 billion, a 50-fold increase from when we first wrote about the topic in 2021 . This includes $61.8 billion in immersive entertainment, $20.1 billion in social good, $71.3 billion in experiential marketing, $99.8 billion in digital content (digital streaming, music streaming, podcasts, and e-Sports), and $217.9 billion in interactive technologies, including AR/VR and video games.
So how did we get here? In the early 2000s, audience members would travel to places like London, where Punchdrunk came of age, and where the hit show Sleep No More was first produced in a disused building. Since 2011, the production has resided at the McKittrick Hotel, a “hotel” with a fictional history created using adjoining empty warehouses in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.
The success of Sleep No More and other early offerings led to experimentation over the next decade at varying scales and in additional venue types. US-based immersive theatrical companies like Third Rail Projects and Woodshed Collective worked in spaces as varied as abandoned schools, hospitals, museums, and even taxi cabs. In London, Secret Cinema put audience members “inside” their favorite movies, including Back to the Future and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!
As theatrically-based immersive exploded, visual artists and technologists also began centering audience members in both participatory and sensory environments. These experiences, which were easily “socially-distanced,” boomed during the pandemic. Lighthouse Immersive launched Immersive Van Gogh, which has been seen by over 5.5 million people in 20 cities to-date. Another major example is the art collective Meow Wolf, originally installed in Sante Fe, New Mexico in 2015, with permanent locations now in Las Vegas and Denver, and Dallas-Fort Worth on the horizon. Abroad, teamLab infused science and technology into immersive art experiences, notably teamLab Borderless in Tokyo and Shanghai with future installations in Germany and Abu Dhabi. In Barcelona, IDEAL created experiences that experiment with projections, augmented reality, and holography. These immersive art experiences have been installed all manner of spaces.
As the immersive entertainment field matures, performing arts institutions invested in developing, producing, and presenting immersive to provide audiences with site-specific alternative entertainment not accommodated in traditional fixed-seat theatres and concert halls. Since 2010, Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ Off-Center has been a leader in the space. DCPA President & CEO Janice Sinden says, “Off-Center has diversified DCPA’s offerings, attracting new contributed revenue, gaining national recognition and press, and reaching tens of thousands of new and adventurous audience members. It has unlocked a new model that will help the DCPA remain relevant and thrive into the future.” Off-Center has created large-scale productions including Sweet & Lucky with Third Rail Projects, the award-winning holiday extravaganza, Camp Christmas, and, most recently, David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar’s Theater of the Mind, which DCPA reports was seen by 42,000 audience members in groups of no more than 16 at a time and which had a $13.6 million economic impact. Off-Center Executive Director & Curator Charlie Miller adds, “One of the lessons we’ve learned by producing work in a wide variety of venue (warehouses, event spaces, storefronts, and public spaces) is the importance of good partnerships. We’ve had some amazing partners who inspire creativity, see the value in activating their space or development, collaborate to maximize the impact on their venue and the neighborhood, and share in the benefit of great publicity, new community relationships, and thousands of new audience members.”
Recently, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Blumenthal Performing Arts took advantage of the COVID pandemic shutdowns to re-imagine how and where it connected with its audiences. Recognizing that Federal aid to the sector was meant intended to activate jobs, the team at Blumenthal partnered to produce Immersive Van Gogh and endeavored to expand its community relevance by including local artists in the design and delivery of the space (a historic 76,000 square foot former Ford factory), the creation of artist workspace, as well as offering local artist and artisan products for sale. These efforts paid off, selling 300,000 tickets and putting over $400,000 back in the pockets of local artists. Blumenthal President and CEO Tom Gabbard notes, “We opened with two simple goals, to get people back to work and reacclimate audiences to attending shows indoors. We closed after nearly seven months with ticket sales of over $16 million, 80% of whom were new ticket buyers. We see immersive programming in non-traditional space as our best opportunity to grow financially and in service to our community.”
While much of the not-for-profit live performing arts and entertainment sector was shut down, there was significant investment from the for-profit part of the sector. Netflix extended its franchises into immersive — including Stranger Things, Bridgerton, and even Peaky Blinders (with plans for a movie, VR experience, whiskey and a new ballet). Fever, an evolving immersive live events company, received a $227M investment from a Goldman Sachs-led group of investors, with another $$110M investment in early 2023. Secret Cinema, the London-based live film experience company that has sold over 1 million tickets to its 50 shows, has been sold to US mobile ticketing platform TodayTix Group for a reported $100M.
So, what should venue owners and operators make of this exponential growth? First, venues need to understand that the total experience entertainment market is larger and includes more content than one might guess, and each of these industries are finding more ways to embed themselves in our lives. For example, A24, the indie film studio who recently won Oscars for its film Everything Everywhere All At Once, has entered the live entertainment space with its purchase of the Off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City. This follows the news in 2018 that Audible, a podcast and audiobook streaming platform, leased the Minetta Lane Theatre for live productions under its Audible Theater banner. Fever, which started as a ticketing platform, now produces its own Candlelight Concerts in cities around the United States.
The pandemic has accelerated changes in how people spend their leisure time. Since 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey has shown that consumer spending reinforces a preference for tactile experiences over passive experiences. And, we are all craving connection — something that was desperately missing during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mikhael Tara Garver, a pioneer and leader in immersive for over 20 years, who was the director of immersive experience for Disney’s recently opened Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser and runs 13Exp, her own immersive studio, says, “We are at a powerful inflection point for the immersive field. Post-lockdown audiences prefer an experience that is only possible because of their physical presence. Audiences already have innovative entertainment at home; now, immersive is succeeding when it harnesses the superpowers of a particular venue, art-form, or story: Galactic Starcruiser is the first narrative-led immersive experience of its scale, Meow Wolf is a massive collaboration of visual artists’ voices, and Sleep No More taps into our more epic voyeuristic desires. If the last 20 years have proved anything, it’s that, with the right expertise bringing it together, the immersive field can expand as far as we can imagine.”
To own a piece of the immersive entertainment market and keep those dollars in the community, venue operators must think differently. Venues can no longer just be presenters or producers, doing business as usual and expecting audiences to show up. Venues need to re-imagine how partnerships work, how and where content is created with craft and expertise, how and where it is delivered, and how to build pipelines of new immersive content. Venues thinking creatively about how to use their space — from small scale experiences in their lobbies prior to performances of the symphony or ballet, to acquiring flexible spaces that can be renovated to fit the needs of the next project — will capture market share that might otherwise not be realized.
We should think of immersive as additive — it doesn’t replace what we already do; immersive is a way of engaging broader participation from those that may have never set foot in our doors before. Garver observes, “Live experiences are going to have to lean further and further into “the art of presence.” Look at ABBA Voyage, using technology as a tool to harness a crowd of dancing queens. With specialized immersive design we can bring audiences back together.” In the future, the most successful venues will be the ones who had the bravery to take that leap.
About the Author
Jon Faris is the Midwest Director with AMS Planning & Research. Based in Chicago, Illinois, Jon was the Managing Director of Writers Theatre for fourteen years. He led the design and construction of its new state-of-the-art theatre center, designed by internationally renowned architect and MacArthur Fellow recipient Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects with planning support provided by AMS. After Writers Theatre, Jon was the Head of Production Operations for Category41, an immersive and experiential entertainment studio that creates experience-driven entertainment at the intersection of digital and physical.
About AMS Planning & Research
Founded in 1988, AMS is committed to the value of arts, culture, and entertainment in communities. Our purpose is to help leaders, institutions, and the sector adapt and change to realize ventures that are effective, resilient, and vital.
Our more than 30 years of experience in service to arts, cultural, and entertainment organizations assures that our team has the knowledge and expertise to provide meaningful perspective in these dynamic times. Our deep engagement in the industry enables us to capture and share insights, document best practices, and develop frameworks that provide strategic direction needed move forward with informed, practical, and achievable recommendations. See www.ams-online.com for more information.
AMS is deeply engaged in social and racial justice. We appreciate each person’s uniqueness, celebrate diversity and are committed to equity, inclusion and accessibility across all aspects of our work. Our Expanding Pathways to Consulting Fellowship, established in 2019, is the first and only program of its kind in the arts and cultural consulting space.
