The King of Prussia mall stands defiant, a fortress of commerce holding vigil at the edge of the Philadelphia suburbs. Where malls across the nation falter, King of Prussia continues to hold court, buoyed by efforts to use its tremendous expanse (2,793,200 square feet, the fourth-largest mall in the nation) to host novel “experiences” beyond mere retail. It’s slowly adapting the American Dream mall approach: becoming a space for not just shopping, but for losing yourself.
Netflix, it turns out, has similar ambitions. This week, the streaming company opened its first so-called Netflix House, billed as a hub for fans to explore immersive experiences based on Netflix shows, enjoy light bites and drinks cheekily named after the streamer’s movies and TV shows, take lots of photos to share on social media, and buy plenty of swag. “You’ve invited us into your home for more than two decades, and now, we’re able to return the favor by welcoming you into ours,” the press release trumpeting the opening of the King of Prussia location reads. The second location, in Dallas’ Galleria mega-mall, will follow in December.
There are two ways to enter King of Prussia’s Netflix House. The first is directly, through a lit red exterior facade meant to pay homage to the red envelopes that Netflix used to send its DVD rentals out in, before the company became what it is today. The other is through the interior of the mall, although that route went unused for the grand opening “housewarming party” that Netflix held on Monday, two days before Netflix House opened to the public. CEO Ted Sarandos was there, giving Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro “the key to Netflix House.” Wednesday’s Luis Guzmán, Emily in Paris’ Ashley Park, and other Netflix luminaries were in attendance, along with members of the press, including myself.
Kat Kendon/Netflix Attractions
Netflix House is a disorienting place to be in, whether there are famous people present or not. Its cavernous space is devoted to imagining a world where Netflix is the most important thing in your life, and not just an idle way to pass the time. Go in through that front entrance and you are immediately in front of a massive red staircase full of promise, flanked by two murals full of iconography from Netflix’s biggest shows. A Thing sculpture juts out to welcome fans of Wednesday, while mannequins wearing Squid Game’s trademark masked jumpsuits stand on a pedestal. Stare at the murals longer and you’ll spot even more shows: a character from Big Mouth, Anya Taylor-Joy’s image contemplating a neon chessboard from The Queen’s Gambit. It evokes the off-kilter oddities of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but also the sensation of restlessness that I associate with scrolling through the Netflix queue—the vague feeling that there must be something I want to do here, but unsure if it is any of this. I felt much the same when perusing the Netflix Bites menu: Maybe the Bridgerton cocktail will do the trick. (It’s lovingly assembled but offers little to the palate.) Or a Red Bite, Green Bite lettuce wrap, from Squid Game. (The lettuce is not up to the task, the protein overly chewy.)
Nothing felt right—and, much like most nights in watching Netflix, my choices were mostly made out of resignation.
“Fan experiences,” as these kinds of installations are called, come with a neat little rhetorical defense at the ready: They immediately position themselves as for people who get it. Don’t like what you see? Well, of course. You’re not a fan. Case closed.
But let’s say you are a Netflix fan, as anyone making a pilgrimage to Netflix House is sure to be. What, then, are you a fan of? For the past five years, Netflix has been on a relentless campaign to become a fandom hub, a never-ending Comic-Con celebrating itself. You could mark this journey based on the growth of the company’s Tudum fan events. From modest beginnings as a fan event held in São Paulo in January 2020, to the outrageously lavish, livestreamed spectacle of this summer’s Tudum 2025, Netflix has worked hard to make its brand feel like a party, an event, a monument to entertainment. That’s quite a task for a brand that, famously, is synonymous with something people do when they’ve got nothing else going on.
This investment in “fandom”—the economic force distinct from a community with a shared interest; the careful cultivation of an audience’s identity, blurring the line between self and consumption—has long been a central concern of Netflix’s marketing. It’s why, during Twitter’s heyday, the company spun up a number of identity-driven accounts, from @strongblacklead (to appeal to Black Twitter) to @contodo (“Netflix in Spanglish”), all in the same overly familiar first-person voice that was a hallmark of corporate overtures to millennials. Early and often, Netflix’s comms asserted that the unnamed person typing every social media post was just like you, eager to see Jenna Ortega #slay on Wednesday. Or maybe #WedneSLAY, if they’re feeling clever.
They’ve been courting and rearing fandom for years. And, as observers of the Mandela effect or Donald Trump can tell you, if you insist on something long enough, people will believe you. For a decade, Netflix has been tilling the earth, creating its own reality where its content is arena rock and not, well, mall Muzak. And now, with Netflix House, you can go there. It’s fandom made physical, rendered into an altar at which to worship.
Immersive entertainment has been on the rise for some time now, in tandem with the creep of social media into daily life. The popularity of Meow Wolf’s immersive art theme parks—otherworldly, Instagram-friendly spaces where guests are invited to explore and manipulate their environments, to find secret passages and decipher elaborate hidden stories—has inspired a host of imitators, or interest in similarly authored experiences.
King of Prussia’s Netflix House offers two of these: Wednesday: Eve of the Outcasts, and One Piece: Quest for the Devil Fruit. The latter is the lesser attraction, essentially an escape room with a touch of story. You’re a pirate crew on the East Blue, solving puzzles in scenes pulled from the world of the show. Like most escape rooms, the theming feels bare-bones and kind of cheap, more carnival attraction than theme park.
Eve of the Outcasts, however, is a genuinely impressive attraction, a macabre carnival designed by Wednesday Addams full of games to play and a simple mystery to solve, if you’re so inclined and don’t mind sending text messages to “Thing.” There’s a (nonoperational) carousel with electric chairs instead of ponies, that sort of thing. The sets are striking—a large moon hangs over the whole thing—and there’s a neat little intro in a pitch-perfect reproduction of the dorm that Wednesday shares with her werewolf roommate, Enid. The whole thing is a nice way to kill an hour with someone who likes Wednesday, or the Addams Family, if a bit too slight to justify the trip and the cost by itself. (Prices for these ticketed experiences start at $39 each.)
Of course, Netflix House, which is otherwise free to enter, has a bunch of other ways for you to spend your time and money. There’s all the merch, some with local flair (NetPHLix, get it?). A Bridgerton photo booth (sponsored by MasterCard). Two VR rooms (tickets starting at $25) with games based on Squid Game, Stranger Things, and Rebel Moon. And, most curiously, the Tudum Theater: a 229-seat screen that, if it’s not being used for special events or programming, will be a drop-in, drop-out theater to catch Netflix programming.
Kat Kendon/Netflix Attractions
The spread of activities is so scattershot and disjointed in a way that feels a lot like Netflix’s signature offering: TV made for people who are also doing other things. Naming your $12 onion dip after Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is the kind of thing Disney Parks get away with because they are selling a very specific fantasy, one where the rest of the world is no longer available to you. But Netflix House, like Netflix, sits in close proximity with the rest of the world. You can probably even get better onion dip steps away at the same mall.
It’s not that Netflix isn’t on to something with this new venture. There is a despondence to modern life and the increasingly few ways that discretionary income affords us any relief. There is an allure to the notion of a space that allows us to leave this world more fully—and perhaps more affordably—than a visit to a theme park would allow for, or at a scale greater than theater companies like Sleep No More’s Punchdrunk can produce. One sympathizes—and, hell, even a shitty escape room can be fun with a game enough crowd. These are not activities meant for you to do solo, and I did wish I had some friends with me to gawk at the bombast of it all with. Not, however, enough that I would ask them to cough up $39 a head.
What does Netflix like? Whatever you like.
What makes Netflix’s efforts to become an immersive real-world destination so galling isn’t necessarily its shamelessness. There is a strong resemblance in Netflix’s efforts to the world of video games, where fans are encouraged to incorporate the entertainment they consume into their identity, to the point that they will sit through hourslong marketing presentations showing a barrage of trailers, broken up by the occasional celebrity appearance, corporate hype-person, or awkward bit.
But what rankles is how little Netflix has to offer in return. The streamer’s brand identity is a lack of brand identity. It is your best friend and everyone’s best friend. What does Netflix like? Whatever you like.
So when it’s time for Netflix to elevate a set of shows, to erect its pillars of fandom, and build IRL experiences around them, the selections are remarkable in how they have little new to bring to the table. One Piece is a live-action adaptation of a manga phenomenon—second fiddle to an animated adaptation that has been running just as long as the comic, and eager to produce uncanny replications of artist Eiichiro Oda’s wonderfully cartoony designs. Wednesday, another current hit, is similarly a copy of a copy, relying on decades of pop-cultural familiarity with Charles Addams’ most famous creation, funneled through the equally familiar visual stylings of Tim Burton. Both shows are popular, but they are also flagrant coattail riders, contributing virtually little new to the world other than the exuberant performances of their lead actors.
It’s alarming how little an entertainment company of this size and impact has contributed to our visual pop-culture lexicon, how many of its biggest shows are copies of copies. Stranger Things re-creates the ’80s not as they were, but as they were filmed. Even its monsters—the Demogorgon, the Vecna—are openly taken from Dungeons & Dragons, with appearances reworked to fit in the show’s Amblin-inspired world. Since that all-too-brief initial period in which Netflix produced original shows at great expense, the company has been at its most successful when it simply buys hits incubated elsewhere. K-Pop Demon Hunters, the streamer’s runaway smash of the year, ended up a Netflix title due to Sony’s reluctance to fully finance the film itself, making for one of the most remarkable bag fumbles of the decade.
This is a consistently strange thing about the home of Stranger Things. Netflix, in all this fandom jockeying, is laying claim to the idea that it is the new monoculture, which isn’t that far-fetched a notion. When it has a hit, it hits big, and can often make a hit out of other networks’ flops. The 2022 Paramount+ Halo show was effectively DOA on that streamer, but on Netflix? It’s a Top 10 hit. But again, so little of this demonstrable clout has contributed to our shared cultural language. It’s telling, in fact, that Netflix’s biggest offering in this regard might be Squid Game, an international production about the brutal plight of the working class in the age of wealth inequality, a desperate struggle to survive against the glib set dressing of children’s games. (Netflix House’s Squid Game experience, Squid Game: Survive the Trials, is exclusive to the Dallas location.)
Laura Miller
Netflix’s Frankenstein Offers a Different Spin on One of Literature’s All-Time Assholes
Read More
-
One of the Most Bonkers Shows on TV Is Back. It’s Somehow Gotten Worse.
-
There’s One President in American History Who Absolutely Did Not Want the Job. A New Show Reveals Why He Was Right to Be Worried.
-
This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only
Netflix Has Gone Physical. It’s … Weird, to Say the Least.
-
The Psychiatrist Who Studied Nazi Officials After the War Found Something Shocking. It Didn’t Earn Him Any Fans.
It would be disingenuous to behave as if Netflix fans didn’t exist. It would be equally disingenuous to not consider their most common critique of the company: that it loves to smother shows in the cradle, to be haphazard in what it promotes and what it does not, all with a lack of transparency that leaves audiences and critics alike adrift in their efforts to discern what success looks like for the company. Because of this, Netflix House feels—to borrow a term Netflix social accounts would use—cringe. Like a boyfriend everyone knows isn’t going to stick around. Consider the fates of many of the shows here: Squid Game has concluded, though it is artificially extended by the reality competition Squid Game: The Challenge. Stranger Things, similarly, is about to end, and any appetite for spinoff media like the forthcoming Stranger Things: Tales from 85 has yet to be proven. A third season for Wednesday has been greenlit, but is unlikely to air until 2027, and odds it will continue beyond that are slim. One Piece is the only Netflix cornerstone highlighted here that seems built to last, and that is largely due to an astonishing wealth of source material to adapt.
Netflix House isn’t best understood as bringing online content to the real world, but fashioning the real world into an online one. A carnival of copycat icons, in an edifice where context does not exist. Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher who wrote Simulacra and Simulation, would have lost his mind in the Netflix House. I just lost a few hours, wondering on the drive home if the place would suffer the fate of most Netflix shows, and get canceled in three years.
