“Immersive” entertainment is all the fashion

Attendance is sluggish at movies and museums, but individuals are flocking to “immersive” shows that allow them walk around (virtually) in a Van Gogh painting, King Tut’s tomb or a surreal fantasy world.

Why it matters: Persons are craving to ditch their sofas and phone screens for transcendent experiences that allow them move around and mingle, untethered from a theater seat or virtual reality headset.

Driving the news: The surprise popularity of the half-a-dozen competing immersive Van Gogh exhibitions that hit the U.S. through the COVID-19 pandemic helped open the floodgates for similar shows, which make world-class art and artifacts more accessible and fascinating.

• Advances in projection mapping enable producers to construct dazzling spectacles.
• “You walk in and turn into transported to a different world,” says Gilles Paquin, CEO of Paquin Entertainment Group, which is behind the “Beyond King Tut” show that just opened in several cities within the U.S. and Canada. “It puts you in a Zen place, a chilled place.”

What’s happening: Production corporations specializing in live shows and stage shows are actually rushing to open immersive entertainment divisions — partly because the unique “Immersive Van Gogh” raked in big bucks.

• The corporate behind “Immersive Van Gogh,” Lighthouse Immersive, “reported selling greater than 5 million tickets between February 2021 and May 2022, indicating that 1 in 90 Americans had bought a ticket,” based on Artnet News.
• Lighthouse’s Van Gogh shows pulled in $250 million in overall revenue, MarketWatch reports — not counting $30 million from the gift shops.

Now it’s also possible to wander through the works of Monet and Klimt, and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

• Other immersive experiences — some patterned after the abstract weirdness of Meow Wolf — include outdoor Lumina Night Walks and indoor shows corresponding to Inter_, a “Fantasia”-like display that just opened in beta in Recent York City.
• Inter_ includes a “sound bath” and interactive tunnels of sunshine, plus bubbles that get released as guests progress.
• “Hopefully down the road, the bubbles will fill with fog and smells,” said Ryan Nelson, the show’s co-founder. “It’ll be a really nice olfactory experience.”

The trend is hitting airports and transit stations too: A recent installation at Newark Liberty International Airport was designed by Moment Factory, which also placed on a “color bath” at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station and multimedia diversions at Los Angeles International Airport.

• Some shows — corresponding to SuperReal, which played last summer on the landmark Cunard Constructing in lower Manhattan — capitalize on the architectural uniqueness of their venue.

What they’re saying: When the Van Gogh show hit Paris in 2019, “I could not understand how you might have a really successful immersive show in a market where you had all the best museums on the planet, after which I noticed that it was a recent art form, should you will,” Paquin said.

• Immersive shows transform audience members from passive to lively participants, explained Jamie Reilly, general manager of Moment Factory.
• “You blur the lines between what’s real and what’s surreal, what’s digital and what’s physical,” she told Axios.

Yes, but: Critics and audience members have called some shows underwhelming, cheesy and expensive.

• The Van Gogh shows “distill fin-de-siècle French painting into an amusement as fascinating as a nursery mobile,” a Recent York Times critic scoffed.
• The Each day Beast asked of “Monet’s Garden”: “Does it really do justice to the wonder of Monet?”

The underside line: Shows that mix art, music and an upbeat ambience dovetail nicely with today’s zeitgeist of wellness, mindfulness and mental health.

• “We’re really encouraging people to go away their issues behind,” says Nelson of Inter_, which is run by an organization called Jobi.
• “We wish to create experiences that give people a reason to get out of their house and have interaction with one another.”