June 1, 2026
Netflix’s foray into LBE, Netflix House, opened venues in Dallas and Philadelphia, with a third planned for Vegas in 2027. Those of us in the entertainment industry are wondering if this could be the start of something much larger. After Disney and Universal, few media companies have the breadth of IP and built-in fan base to power live entertainment like Netflix. Going vertical by bringing passionate fans to physical experiences seems like a great idea, and a theme park would be the ultimate experience.
However, last week during the Prof G Markets Tour at the Wiltern, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos pushed back on the concept. While Sarandos sees live experiences as additive, they are not a major driver of Netflix’s growth. They’re profitable if done “right” and at scale, but the real golden goose is more subscribers.
“It’s a night out. It’s not where you go on vacation,” Sarandos replied when asked about theme parks directly. On whether Netflix is going further into this category, he said the company is “kind of toe dipping on some of this stuff.” The live experiences could be profitable when done “right and at scale.” Netflix is not going to bankroll a destination resort, and it is not going to treat physical as the company’s growth engine.
This framing has similarities to what Josh D’Amaro and Mike Cavanagh said on the last earnings call. Netflix is pursuing more subscribers, while Disney is pitching a hub-and-spoke model with Disney+ at the center, and Comcast is fixing connectivity and Peacock. The growth opportunity is more watch time, and the physical layer is additive.
Where Netflix Sees Growth
Netflix wants more of the TV pie. Netflix ended 2025 with 325+ million paid members and entertains an audience approaching a billion people. Even so, the company says it is under 45% penetrated across the roughly 800 million addressable households, has captured about 7% of the addressable revenue, and accounts for only about 5% of global TV viewing share. Sarandos framed Netflix’s priorities this way on the last earnings call:
- Strengthen the core of series and films.
- Push into new categories like podcasts, regional live sports, and games.
- Improve monetization through pricing and the ad business.
Netflix is competing for the television, not the TikTok feed. Netflix even added vertical short-form video to the app, but Sarandos was direct that it was added “not to compete with TikTok, but to be more discoverable,” echoing the argument Disney+ used when it rolled out Verts. The growth thesis is a share of paid TV time inside a lane Netflix has deliberately drawn, the entertainment-worth-paying-for lane, with the ad-supported tier as the cheap entry point.
In a world filling up with AI slop and free, low-effort phone content, Netflix wants to be the cheap version of premium, the affordable everything-you-might-want-to-pay-for option, and expand its share inside that lane.
Netflix House did not come up once on the April Q1 call, but plenty of other live experiences did. The World Baseball Classic in Japan, the BTS comeback concert, Christmas Day NFL games, and the upcoming K-Pop Demon Hunters tour all got framed the same way: as engagement that deepens the relationship with members. Netflix House sits in the same bucket.
What is Netflix House?
Both Netflix House venues opened in late 2025: Philadelphia at the King of Prussia Mall in November and Dallas at the Galleria in December, each occupying a former department-store anchor. Las Vegas, at the BLVD on the Strip, is slated for 2027. The model is free to enter, with paid ticketed experiences on top. In Philadelphia, the featured Wednesday and One Piece experiences run $39 each, VR experiences $25, and mini golf $15. In Dallas, Squid Game starts around $39 and Stranger Things around $45, with surge pricing reportedly pushing the popular weekend slots toward $49. There’s a full-service, themed restaurant, Netflix Bites, a retail shop, and a 229-seat theater in Philadelphia.
Netflix is also touring K-Pop Demon Hunters live, running the World Baseball Classic, and producing one-off concerts. Netflix House is one node in the live entertainment plan, not the whole live strategy.
A Modular Venue, Not a Destination
The featured experiences are modular and built to identical specs so they can be swapped between locations. CMO Marian Lee has said the team can strike an experience and move it in three to five days.
When you build modular experiences designed to be struck and moved in a week, optimized to delight the fan who already loves the show, you are not building for the destination traveler. Netflix House is a coherent product precisely because it knows what it is and is not.
What It Means for Themed Entertainment
Between Netflix House, Universal’s Horror Unleashed in Las Vegas, and the Universal Kids Resort opening July 1, there’s a lot of experimenting in the LBE world. And I expect more of it, even if it’s not meant to be a major growth driver.
IP owners are planting modular, lighter-capex, rotating experiences all over, built to feed the screen rather than replace it. We will see an explosion in the quality of theming as more brands experiment, and we will also see a ton fail (Willy’s Chocolate Experience, anyone?). I think, for now, Netflix House works because it’s clear about what it is and what it isn’t, and because it’s part of a larger fan engagement strategy.
For us in themed entertainment, this is our whole world. We’re looking at the expansion of LBEs and live activations with wonder at the possibilities. The reality is, it’s one corner of these businesses. For Comcast, parks are about 7% of revenue. Disney invests the most heavily, but D’Amaro has reframed Disney+ as the hub and parks as the spoke feeding it. For Netflix, the houses are something Sarandos described as “toe-dipping.” But that doesn’t mean LBE expansion slows; it simply means these projects get sized to be additive, not to be the next theme park.
