Spoiler alert: in 2025 come the theme parks of your favorite series. They will be like a boutique version of the great Disney, Warner or Universal parks that we have enjoyed since we were kids. Because we fans are not satisfied with just watching fiction on the screen and sharing our passion on social networks. We want to live inside the series. We want to feel what their protagonists feel. In short, we want their lives and experiences.

At the creative agency Darwin & Verne we already did it on the occasion of the premiere of the second season of The Bear on Disney+. With the help of Diego Guerrero, Carmy Berzatto's transcript, we turned his Madrid restaurant DSPEAK into a replica of the Chicago restaurant where the series takes place. The multi-starred Basque chef designed a menu of ten courses, one per episode, which a select group of fans were able to enjoy for a few days.

Disney was the first entertainment giant to offer its fans a fantasy world by recreating scenes from its movies and making its characters jump out of the screen, as Jeff Daniels did in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Disney tried it in 1955 in California and the franchise spread around the world. It would be followed by Universal Studios in Hollywood in 1964, Legoland in Billund (Denmark) in 1968 and Warner Bros. Studio Tours, also in Hollywood, in 1972. More specifically, Popeye's Village (Malta), Pippi Langstrum's house in Stockholm or Parc Asterix in the outskirts of Paris would follow.

Locations are a magnet for movie fans

But film and series fans are not satisfied with the official themed venues. In England, nostalgic fans of historical series such as Return to Brideshead (1981) continue to visit, forty years later, the gardens and halls of Howard Castle in Yorkshire. Lord and Lady Canavan's Highclere Castle sells out every year to visit the imposing Elizabethan mansion of Downton Abbey, southeast of London. There, one of the most desired moments for fans is to have tea under the iconic cedar tree of the series. Tunisia also knows that the first thing tourists ask when they arrive at the hotel is how to get to the Star Wars planet Tatooine.

And if not, just ask the tourists from all over the world who visit the deserts and beaches of Almeria (Spain) and Petra (Jordan) following in the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia and Indiana Jones. Like the fans of Grand Hotel Budapest who tour Gorlitz and Dresden (Germany) and Karlovy Vary (Czech Republic) fascinated by Wes Anderson's imaginary.

People are looking for experiences. They want to materialize the worlds they experience on a screen. That's why today you can have a real breakfast at Tifanny's emulating Audrey Hepburn thanks to the fact that the jewelry store has opened The Blue Box Café at its Fifth Avenue location under the direction of prestigious chef Daniel Boulud.

What is Netflix House?

If you've visited the film sets of Warner's in Hollywood or Cinecittá in Rome, you may have been able to walk through the room where Friends was filmed or pose on the sets of Cleopatra and the films of Fellini and Ford Coppola. Netflix, the big global platform with 250 million subscribers, is about to take the step that the big studios took before.

In 2025, the first two immersive Netflix spaces will open in the US. We do not yet know in which cities. We will be able to buy products associated with the series (merchandising), but that will be the least relevant: the key will be to taste gastronomic proposals and live experiences narrated on the screen. One of the first proposals points to a recreation of the survival tests in The Squid Game.

"Don't think it's going to be like some kind of Disneyland. It's going to be a place you can visit a couple of times a month, not just once in a lifetime," Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos explained. And don't think it's going to be a regular store either. For that Netflix already has an online store where it sells clothing, jewelry or mugs of its series and even pajamas and a sleeping bag for users sick of binge-watching.

Netflix also follows the trend of collaborations with other brands. Thus, it produces and sells sunglasses with Zeus + Dione, luxury clothing with Balmain and customized Lacoste polo shirts for Stranger Things or The Bridgertons. This has just begun.

Experiences as a brand-building lever

Netflix House and those to follow will be examples of how brands will propose experiences and experiences to their consumers, as an integral part of their Marketing. Specifically, as image generation levers. Because Brand and Customer Experiences are fundamental for Marketing Departments to lead Customer Centricity in practice, beyond their role as generators of insights and customer understanding. In other words, they must take the reins of the proactive relationship with the customer.

For this reason, at Darwin & Verne we have launched Beagle, our Customer Experience and Customer Centricity Business Unit. To help companies and their marketing departments to develop disruptive experiences... applying creative thinking to satisfy customer needs and propose solutions to their concerns.