When Mikhael Tara Garver started Culture House Immersive, she brought with her a long career of producing immersive entertainment. As a creative consultant for Walt Disney Imagineering, she helped stretch the worldbuilding of classic Disney stories into the real world through amusement park rides and experiences.
Culture House Immersive, an entertainment studio based in Los Angeles announced on Monday it raised $1 million to launch an incubator that will develop projects that will do the same – take a single story narrative and stretch it across multiple mediums, from film and TV to video games and even restaurants.
Culture House Incubator is part of Culture House Media, a media company that aims to use different platforms outside of the mainstream television and film medium to tell stories. The Culture House team is scattered across L.A., from Santa Monica to Highland Park. The incubator is growing 21 projects that will span immersive reality, audio and physical attractions.
“There is a video game potentially. There is a live journey experience,” Garver said. “You’re just opening up the palette to all these different ways to make something. And for us, narrative is at the center.”
A new kind of media
Culture House Immersive is tapping into the power of fandoms, which often develop with a single television or book series and expand into a world of in-person conventions, video games, fanfiction and merchandise. It’s not something cloistered to The Walt Disney Co. – Netflix Inc. announced Netflix House in June. It’s an in-person experience in Pennsylvania that allows people to experience dancing in “Bridgerton,” or playing one of the competitions from the series “Squid Game.”
El Segundo-based Mattel Inc. told the story of Barbie through various movies and TV shows and is opening a theme park in Arizona later in 2024. Mark Cornell, the president at Epic Resort Destinations, said in a statement the theme park team was “redefining the entertainment channel by bringing Mattel’s powerhouse, evergreen brands to life like never before.”
Even big film and television studios are finding ways to tell the same story through multiple platforms. HBO Max turned video game The Last of Us (created by Santa Monica-based Naughty Dog) into a blockbuster miniseries about a zombie apocalypse. Griffin Gaming Partners, a Santa Monica-based venture firm focused on video games, has seen the influence of the city’s video game culture on media – Peter Levin, cofounder and managing director at Griffin, helped bring Fallout to Amazon.com Inc. and turn Candy Crush into a game show. Russell Binder, an intellectual property adviser and venture partner at Griffin, executive produced the video game-turned-movie “Five Nights at Freddy’s.”
“We spend a lot of time working with our portfolio companies at the intersection of gaming, media and sport,” Levin said. “Oftentimes, if you’re a consumer facing company, you may want to partner with an intellectual property partner. This is the market within which to put those relationships together.”
Expanding the narrative
There’s a reason for traditional entertainment studios to tap into new mediums. More Gen Z users spend time watching bite-sized vertical videos on TikTok than they do watching Netflix. In 2023, YouTube beat out Netflix and Amazon as the most streamed platform. The Center for Generational Kinetics found that 74% of Americans now prioritize spending money on experiences over things.
“If you think about Los Angeles, L.A. is just uniquely positioned to capitalize on this macro shift in the global media landscape,” Levin said.
At Culture House Immersive, the incubator projects will create location-based tangible entertainment experiences that have the potential to stretch into other mediums like mixed reality that still create new revenue streams for those stories. And those stories can stretch – Garver said something as simple as a dining experience can turn into an augmented reality experience, whereby chefs can explain their inspirations behind a specific dish.
“I look for what the expansiveness of the relationship (the story) can have with the consumer,” Garver said.
