Immersive entertainment has a naming problem
The future of entertainment is here, we just don’t know what to call it
Last week, news broke that Disney was surveying customers about a new name for its Florida-based Hollywood Studios. The change would come alongside a fundamental reimagining of the park itself, moving away from the ride-centric home to attractions like Star Tours and The Twilight ZoneTower of Terror, and towards a more interactive, immersive land in line with the upcoming Star Wars: Galaxy Edge. “Enter this newly named Disney Theme Park and completely immerse yourself in the realm of some of your favorite stories,” the survey read, promising guests the chance to “step into imagined worlds made real, and take the lead in an adventure that surrounds you at every turn.”
These are issues that arise when any new medium begins migrating into the mainstream. But the trick with immersive entertainment is that it’s not a specific medium like cinema or television.
It’s part of the reason why the immersive sub-genres that have taken off the most have such functional names like “escape room” or “haunted house.” Potential audiences know the baseline parameters for those kinds of experiences going in, just like they do with a movie or a baseball game. “Immersive entertainment,” however, can cover everything from the VR attraction The Void, to Sleep No More, to a months-long alternate reality game and immersive theater hybrid like The Lust Experience. Each of those works are profoundly different, and when they’re stuck with the same label, that label begins to mean nothing at all. Factor in the rise of “immersive” as a general go-to marketing buzzword, and the waters are muddied even further.
Disney is no doubt hoping to sidestep some of that confusion. From everything we’ve learned thus far, the company is trying to create its own particular style of immersive entertainment, one that will combine theme parks, resort hotels, live actors, and interactive environments. Disney can then own that specific kind of experience in the public’s eyes by branding it however it likes. Should it land on an option like “Storyverse Park,” it’s easy to see the company opening a string of those lands across the world.
Talk to the visionaries at ILMxLab, and they describe an interconnected landscape, one where movies, TV, virtual worlds, and other immersive mediums all co-exist simultaneously, part of one gigantic, persistent story world.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/3/16249464/disney-hollywood-studios-immersive-entertainment-naming-problem-being-there