Production companies opening retail/entertainment venues in order to create new revenue streams featuring their own shows and characters is nothing new. Disney Studios and Universal Pictures both did it with their theme parks, for example. Even the Nickelodeon Group television programming channel opened Nickelodeon Universe amusement parks in both the American Dream mall in East Rutherford, N.J., and the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., as well as an accompanying retail store in the Mall of America location. Netflix is also jumping on the bandwagon and opening its own permanent brick-and-mortar stores called Netflix House.
The upcoming Netflix House concept will feature immersive entertainment, a restaurant element, a physical obstacle course (rumored to be based on the Squid Game series), and apparel, toy and gift merchandise that correlates to Netflix’s popular programs. Although Netflix hasn’t yet announced where these new stores will be, the streaming company did reveal there will be two separate Netflix House locations opening in the U.S. in 2025. The presumption is that the sites will be in well-trafficked outdoor lifestyle centers and malls with a large Gen Z/millennial customer base in tourist-heavy cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Miami or Nashville, Tenn.
Rumored locations for upcoming Netflix House sites are anticipated to be in the same cities where Netflix opened other pop-up concepts.
For example, Stranger Things: The Experience, an immersive escape-room-esque three-month pop-up exhibit, that sprang up from the summer of 2022 to early 2023 inside of empty warehouses and vacant multi-purpose event spaces, in the 30,000- to 45,000-s.f. range, in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Seattle. In addition, there were also Stranger Things: The Official Store pop-up shops in mall spaces between 5,000 and 14,000 s.f., over the same time period in Boston, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, New York City and Las Vegas, the latter site of which expects to remain a permanent location in the Showcase Mall.
Over the last year, Netflix has been dabbling in various pop-up retail and restaurant prototypes that are anticipated to factor into the upcoming Netflix House layout. From June to September, Netflix had its Netflix Bites pop-up restaurant inside of the Short Stories Hotel in Los Angeles. The restaurant featured menus developed from the chefs and mixologists on the streaming service’s popular cooking-themed reality shows. In addition, from October 2022 until January 2023, Netflix had a 10,000-s.f. two-story pop-up store called Netflix at The Grove at The Grove LA, a high-end open-air mall in Los Angeles. This store carried retail merchandise and photo-op displays from many of its popular shows.
