Brands of all stripes are trying their hand at location-based entertainment (LBE) with an eye in the near term toward smaller projects that carry lower costs and faster time to market.

Time and Money
For the balance of this year and into 2022 the focus appears to be on smaller escape rooms, family entertainment centers (FEC) and the like.  That’s partly because the costs (from several hundred thousand dollars to upwards of $2 million) are relatively low and many projects can be completed in months, as opposed to the years that go into developing a theme park. Also, there’s widespread availability of marked-down space at malls and other venues where stores have closed.

“These all have a low capital investment and property costs, which can be a significant part of the business model, are much lower,” says Jim Seay, President of ride developer Premier Rides. “What makes it [escape rooms, FECs] even more tempting is there is a significant pent-up demand and many of the parks are doing extremely well and are packed with people.

“There has definitely been a retraction of capital budgets [for the larger theme parks] and many of our clients aren’t looking for a return to a ‘normal’ year until 2024. Right now, we are focused on the value aspect of the business. A lower capital product that might have a tie-in with intellectual property that can bring people in might be a good investment.”

Brand Experience
Says Robert Marick, EVP Global Consumer Products and Experiences at MGM: “In the past, large brand studio parks were all the rage, but what I am seeing now is that consumers still want to get out and want to experience brands, and developers are looking for quick wins.

“That means smaller experiences or entertainment centers; it’s less about the big resorts and more about the indoor centers, especially in malls where a former department store has the perfect footprint for a family entertainment center. If a licensor can provide a branded experience, everyone is a winner because it gives consumers a new way to experience a brand and mall operators a new way to drive traffic.”

Among other developments in licensed location-based experiences:

• Ubisoft licensee Osool is expected to open the first of three Assassins Creed branded escape rooms later this year in Saudi Arabia, targeting 8-40 year olds.
• Egan Escape Productions is opening a new 5,000-sq-ft. Blair Witch escape room in Las Vegas; it started accepting reservations last Friday (July 30), but hasn’t set an opening date for the 60-minute “experience.”
• Mattel licensee iP2Entertainment will open a 25,000-sq.-ft FEC in Toronto in 2022, the first of what is expected to be a series of locations featuring Barbie, Hot Wheels and Mega Bloks sections. The FEC was slated to debut in 2020, but delayed by the pandemic.
• Mad Systems launched the first of what are expected to be several stops for a Crayola IdeaWorks exhibition at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, PA. The exhibition features wireless technology, including an RFID system, and 50 exhibits, 30 of which have barcode readers for tracking a journey around the museum.
• “Harry Potter: A Forbidden Forest Experience” will launch this fall with lighted trails in the woods near Arley Hall in Cheshire, UK. The path will feature some “beasts” that live in the forests of author J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World franchise.
• Merlin Entertainment, which opened a Lego Theme Park in Goshen, NY earlier this summer after a year’s delay due to the pandemic, will launch the seven-ride Peppa Pig Theme Park in 2022 near Legoland in Winter Haven, FL.
• Paramount Pictures licensee PT Kios Ria Kreasi is expected to “soft” open a Paramount theme park in Bali in 2022 with a goal of attracting five million visitors annually.
• Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment’s Paramount Theme Park is being delayed by the pandemic. Construction was originally scheduled to start in late 2022, but has been delayed six months in pushing the opening date to early 2025.
• The Universal Studios park in Beijing is expected to open in the next “couple of months,” after having missed earlier plans for an May opening, NBCUniversal CEO Jeffrey Shell The company also opened a park in Japan with capacity restrictions that are expected to remain in place through the summer.
  “We’re optimistic that our domestic parks are on a path to return to historic levels of profitability,” Shell said. “But we need international visitation to resume, which remains dependent on COVID related travel restrictions being lifted.”