ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a model of the immersive cinema experience economy and examines its characteristics through the analysis of a dominant provider in the UK, Secret Cinema. Immersive cinema experiences are extended live experiences based upon a discrete film or media property, which incorporate an augmented screening in a highly constructed and commodified narrative filmscape. The participants are integrated into this filmscape through extensive experience design incorporating costume, role-play, engagement with performers, and detailed scenography. We situate the immersive cinema experience economy within the wider “experience economy” and characterize it as a project-based sector that integrates organizations and individuals from the screen, service, and creative industries, and from the sub-sectors of immersive, branding, and film tourism. We argue that the hybridity of this immersive cinema economy is a key characteristic of activities within the experience economy. This emergent area of value creation has hitherto been invisible (partly at least due to this hybridity) but the very recent commercial and creative partnerships brokered by Secret Cinema suggest that this is an area with the potential for significant national and international growth.
