Monthly Archives: May 2024

Back to the Future

Posted on May 21, 2024 | 1 comment

In January this year, Sony opened its 45,000 square foot Wondervse in a suburb of Chicago at the Oak Brook Mall.  The “Location-Based Entertainment” Center (LBE) offers immersive experiences and food and beverage based on Sony’s extensive library of intellectual properties.  Currently, Jumanji, Bad Boys, Uncharted, and Ghostbusters provide the basis of the themed areas, although many “pop-up” and changing exhibits are envisioned. The center attempts to combine every popular out-of-home entertainment concept, including virtual reality, an escape room, bumper cars, and food and beverage, all branded as Sony/Columbia well-known films.

Though development cost has not been publicly disclosed, we imagine the cost at $1,000 to $1,500 per square foot, putting the attraction at $45 million to $65 million.  That’s a lot of investment to recoup, no matter what you pencil in as the NOI or payback period.

From 1993 through 1997, almost 30 years ago, JB Research Company provided market, consumer and financial feasibility research and consulting for an untested proof-of-concept entertainment product which morphed into the now defunct Metreon in San Francisco and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.  We did this type of feasibility testing for locations in San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and Tokyo.  The new product was a location-based concept, also based on Sony brands, but in very different brand exercise than the Wonderverse concept.  At that time, Sony (Japan) wanted the world to understand and brand-integrate their different companies that offered music, television, motion pictures, motion picture theaters and video games, all under the  Sony brand.  Well, that didn’t work!  The only location to be built with the eventual Moniker of “Metreon” failed, then hung on for decades reimagining its core entertainment concepts as popular retail/dining and entertainment, then finally closed in 2023.  The project is now an AMC theater (originally a Sony Theater) and a massive Target in the SOMA district of San Francisco, right across from the Moscone convention center.  The cost, never disclosed publicly, was more than $250 million!

Our practice centers on helping companies make decisions based on potential profitability.  The model for a profitable attraction is simple:

NOI x Payback Period = Development Cost

NOI is Net Operating Income and Number of Years is determined by the Industry Standard Payback.  Development cost is really what you should/or can afford to spend based not on what you want to do or what the designer/engineers/creative people tell you, but what the economics dictate.   

Every imaginable scenario can be tested by varying the three numbers in this formula.  It’s the secret sauce for any attraction ever built or imagined. 

Income is always based on attendance, and in an indoor attraction, that is based on the capacity of the venue on its “Design Day,” which is any of the 15 to 20 busiest days of the year.  (Capacity should never be built for the highest attended day of the year.  That’s very wasteful and doesn’t pencil.)  Indoor attractions are capacity constrained, so this value is always one of the most important determinants of potential profitability.    

We are waiting anxiously and patiently to see how Wonderverse plays out in terms of attendance, revenue and profitability.  In the meantime, we would love to hear from you on what you think of the whole “back to the future” paradigm for LBE’s.  Tell us what you are working on to make your new bright ideas pencil!

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Museums Are Telling Stories That Need to be Told

Posted on May 2, 2024 | Comments Off on Museums Are Telling Stories That Need to be Told

We need a new word for “museum” which calls to mind blank white walls with paintings created by old white men depicting gorgeous scenes of beautiful ladies sitting waterside with flowers and picnics.  Don’t get me wrong, these are pleasing images and I love looking at them.  But it turns out their interest and subjects leave out about 90% of the population in the world.

The world has changed.  The arts are a reflection of our society and our cultural mores. And baby, “the times they are a changin”. In response, museums are listening to the outcry.  The modern audience is new, fresh, young, black, brown, yellow, LBGTQ, female, elder, street-wise, colorful!  They want to hear about music, history, life-experience, and feeling they understand, both within (or without) the walls of our institutions.

While museums are normally thought of as staid and conservative,  our most progressive institutions, those that have realized they must change or perish, are singing a new song.  They are changing the location, experience, design, subject, and setting.  They are ENGAGING new audiences.

Last week’s New York Times offered two sections on Museums.  “More to see, do and feel -Museums are striving to expand the experiences of their visitors.”   Rock on, I say.  Some examples:

Christopher Wool decided that because galleries are so staid and expected, he would show his famous and very expensive sculptures in a raw industrial space within an office building in Manhattan.  He says in an interview that “Imperfection is the goal.  You get tension with imperfection and small amounts of chaos in these pieces, which is strengthened by how unfinished and raw the space is.”

All over the United States from San Francisco, Charleston, Oklahoma City,  Little Rock, and Philadelphia, new museums are exploring outdoor spaces as an integral part of the experience.  They are creating welcoming, collaborative spaces, where guests feel inspired and also engulfed by beauty.  Landscaping and sculptures, street furniture, water, wind  are  melded together to form an alchemy of stories in these outdoor spaces, which are not gardens, by any stretch of the imagination. 

In North Miami, the story of Haiti’s troubled history and a personal story of Manuel Mathleu, the exhibition’s creator, is told through paintings and ceramics, many of which depict violence and tumult. 

At the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, industrial history  is the subject of a huge exhibition, as part of the Forum Series.  The exhibition, a collaboration with Maria Watt and The Poetry Collection utilizes glass, steel and blankets as the materials of her creations

In this tumultuous time of political, racial and ethnic polarization and violence,  college protests have become a real campus issue.  In the spirit of encouraging calm and empathetic behavior, ten college museums  are collaborating on one simple activity voting. Sculptures at the University of Oregon in Eugene provide a deep dive into the false depiction of society in a Norman Rockwell painting. 

Mental illness s the subject of a new exhibition at the Mississippi of Art through a display of “What Became of Dr. Smith, a 122-foot long painting of Noal Saterstrom exploring is great-grandfather’s 40-year travails in the Mississippi State Insane Hospital.  Among other things, he explores his own battles with depression and depersonalization.

This fresh and sometimes disturbing new museum content and form expand human understanding and connection through art, in a time when the world is anything but peaceful.  Perhaps this should be the mission of all museums, in hopes that someday soon, it will no longer be so desperately needed. 

As I wrote these words, I discovered that these types of new and thoughtful attractions have always formed the basis of my practice.  Our body of work includes museums of motion pictures, television arts and sciences, Native American stories, Negro League Baseball, young female empowerment and carousels, to name just a few.  I just never thought about it in that way.  JB Research Company has always worked on projects for the 90%!

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Posted in Attractions, Culture, Entertainment, Entertainment Industry, JB Research Company, museums, Nonprofit