You have probably heard of The Marvel Experience, and if you are like me, you were left wondering what it is. In our world of themed entertainment, the word “experience” can be used to describe many different things. I knew that Roy E. Disney’s Shamrock Holdings is one of the investors, I knew that the traveling experience involved a series of domes, and I knew they hired some designers with impressive resumes;
but I still struggled to understand what “The Marvel Experience” is. I had the chance to talk to Rick Licht, the CEO of Hero Ventures, which is producing the experience. After talking to him, I have to say that I just can’t wait to see this experience. If it delivers on its promise, it may be a game changer.
However, I digress. Let me tell you a little bit about Rick. A lawyer by trade, Rick focused on sports law. He then became one of the co-founders of the All-Star Cafe which you may remember had a location at Walt Disney World. Rick later formed Ultimate Sports Entertainment, which transformed pro athletes into Super Heroes in retail and promotional comic books with MLB, NBA and the NFL. So without further ado, here is our interview with Rick. If it gets you as excited for the project as it made me, tickets are available now for the tours first four stops (Phoenix, Dallas, San Francisco, and San Dieg0) at Ticketmaster.
Benji: There’s a lot of Marvel, for lack of a better word, experiences out there. What is this Marvel Experience?
Rick: I’ve got to tell you, Ben, it’s an adventure like nothing you’ve ever seen. Everything about what we’re doing with The Marvel Experience is designed to be next generation, designed to be hyper-reality, designed to put you in the action with Spider-Man, The Avengers, Wolverine, all these magnificent characters. That’s why we’re using a dome complex. We have the only traveling dome complex in the world. It’s three acres. I don’t know how familiar you are with size, but it’s awfully, awfully huge. It’s not something you’d find in a convention center or an exhibition hall or the local stadium. We have to rent out an enormous plot of land, and we’re putting up seven massive domes, over fifty thousand square feet of domes. The center dome is twenty thousand square feet by itself and over sixty-five feet high. It’s not small. You take this type of next-generation venue and technology and you’ve got to put something really special in it, and we’re trying to do this hyper-reality, which is what we believe is the next step, the next level of putting you in the middle of it. To that end, Ben, we have the only traveling 4-D motion ride in the country. If you’re familiar with Back to the Future or Star Tours or Despicable Me. Do you know these rides?
Benji: Absolutely.
Rick: Okay. We’ve got the fully articulated chairs. You know the ones, the expensive chairs, without question. People are going to know that everything about this is a little pricy, except the ticket price. We’ve managed to keep the ticket price in the thirty-dollar range, which is much smaller than you’d expect. I hope it’s much smaller than you’d expect.
Benji: Absolutely. Considering going to a basketball game is eighty bucks.
Rick: It’s the price of two movie tickets, and it’s a heck of a lot more than a movie. Yeah, we wanted to keep it affordable. We wanted to make sure that a family can go out and spend a day and not have to take out a mortgage. At the same time, with what the big theme parks cost and with us, we’re taking this city that we’re building with the domes and we’re bringing it to your city. There’s no flights, no hotels, no rental cars. You can, hopefully, drive from your house when we come to your town and it’s going to be in the thirty-dollar range and you’re going to get a day that we expect is going to be not only memorable but unforgettable.
Benji: Just to make sure we understand what it is from a storytelling perspective. Is it one long story that goes throughout the whole experience? Or is it a different-
Rick: Yes. Think of it as one attraction at a theme park, but instead of something being five or ten or fifteen minutes with waiting in the queue and going through the experience and then exit through the gift shop, think of this as two hours or more in one attraction with highs and lows and ebbs and flows. It’s going to take you on a journey. It’s going to take you on a ride. We worked with Hollywood feature film screenwriters and we worked with Marvel and their creative folks, Joe Quesada, who I expect you know?
Benji: Yes. The chief creative officer of Marvel Entertainment.
Rick: Yeah. Joe was involved with his team in making sure that the story works, that the story fits the Marvel universe and captures the essence of the characters and the sense of teamwork and adventure and humor that is prevalent throughout the Marvel movies.
Benji: Starting in the eighties, everyone philosophized that the future of theme park attractions or themed entertainment was going to be … Eventually someone was going to create the first feature-length attraction, first two-hour experience that was one big story, but no one ever did it. Do you feel that this is the first feature-length attraction to be built?
Rick: Oh, there’s a lot of firsts here. As far as I know, it is. It’s the first attraction that goes two-plus hours. Half of it, roughly, is self-guided, so this could easily be three hours if you wanted to. There’s certainly enough content inside. There’s enough interactive and immersive elements that will keep you engaged for really as long as you’d like. I mentioned the 4-D motion ride before. Let me tell you about one other … There’s a number of firsts, but let me tell you about another that I’m particularly proud of.
It’s a three hundred sixty-degree stereoscopic 3-D dome. You sound like you’re in this world, so I’ll compare it to Oculus Rift, except there’s a hundred forty-eight people without goggles; 3-D glasses, active 3-D glasses, but no goggles. When you’re in a 3-D movie, as you know, Benjie, items are coming off the screen at you. The action is coming off the screen. In this special dome that we’ve created, it’s coming at you from all angles. It’s above you; it’s behind you; it’s on both sides of you. It’s an audience adventure where you’re not even all facing the same way. You’re watching Wolverines to the left, and I’m watching Captain America to the right, and Joe Quesada is watching Black Widow behind us.
Benji: This is obviously a huge undertaking and from what I can understand from it, a big step forward in these kinds of experiences. Can you talk a little bit about the creative folks that helped you create, establish this? I imagine it took a village.
Rick: It’s the biggest step forward from what I can see. When we see some of the other things that are out there, our partners, and we have some elite investors on our team, guys like Michael Cole, Steve Tisch, the WWE, Roy Disney [estate]. There’s a lot of guys in here that are familiar with the theme park world that are saying, hey, how come we’re not charging a heck of a lot more for this? Why is it only in the thirty-dollar range? By the way, tickets for our first four markets are available at Ticketmaster.
The creative process. I mentioned at the top, Benji, that I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and I made a long list of things that I wanted to do, and we probably got about twenty percent of those things done in The Marvel Experience, in this first iteration, and it’s a long-term plan. There should be sequels, and we should be doing this together with Marvel for many, many years to come.
My first and one of the best things I did was bring a guy named Doug Schaer on. Doug is my chief operating officer, and he helped with the creative, helped to rein me in , actually. He’ll tell you there’s a whole slew of things that I wanted to do that it would have taken a lot more time and cost a lot more money and probably would have made the ticket price have to go up. He definitely helped manage that.
Our creative director is a guy named Jerry Rees. Jerry’s done, I believe, sixteen theme park attractions for Disney over the years, including some domed attractions. He’s worked at Disney in Asia and in Paris and here in the United States. He really knows how to get the most out of these characters. He knows how to create a scene; he knows how to create a sense of tension. He also knows that you can’t keep your foot on the gas pedal for two-plus hours. There has to be ups and downs. There has to be humor to offset some of the action and some of the more mature elements of the storyline.
As much as kids are going to love this, Benji, this was geared towards the folks that go see The Avengers, the folks that go see Iron Man 3 and Captain America and Thor movies. That’s an audience that we’ve learned is about sixty percent over the age of twenty-five. Everything that was developed here certainly suitable for a ten-year-old, but the twenty-thirty-forty-year-old is going to get a lot out of this and is going to realize that it’s not for kids, just the same way as The Avengers movie is not just for kids. Jerry was a key element.
We had a guy named Aaron Sims. Aaron has done the character designs for five of the last ten Marvel movies. He’s the guy that created the raised webbing for Spider-Man a couple of films ago. He’s got an incredible eye for this type of thing, and he’s worked with the characters before. He really was intimately familiar with what we were looking for, which was … Yeah, it’s got to look ninety-eight, ninety-nine percent like exactly what you expect, but there’s got to be a little bit, a little bit of our DNA in there. It’s got to be one to two percent us, one to two percent hero ventures so that our merchandise, our high-end animation, feature-film quality animation, is what you’ll see from most of the dome, Benjie. It’s got to look just a heartbeat different than what you might see somewhere else.
Benji: Our readers are very excited about this, and one question that keeps coming up when we post about the press releases you sent out and things like that is do you envision this ever … With the four dates, the first four dates, I believe Phoenix, Dallas, San Francisco, and San Diego have been announced and tickets are available. Do you envision this ever going internationally, outside of the United States?
Rick: We expect to go all around the world. We’ve gotten press requests from the BBC and from a whole slew of places in Japan and China and Europe and the Middle East and a bunch of other places. We know that what we’re doing has struck a chord with the fans. We know that beautiful image of the dome that took months and months and months to create really resonated, not just with the Marvel fans but with movie fans, with theme park fans, with technology fans, with gamers. They want to know what’s inside. They want to know what hyper-reality is. They want to know what The Marvel Experience is, and we can’t wait to show it to them. The first day that people walk through that door, you won’t be able to wipe the smile off my face, Benji.
Benji: We’re all very excited about it. Is there any final facts or any information you’d like to share that we might not have covered about the Experience?
Rick: You’ve got the cities and the dates. You know we’re on Ticketmaster. I think saying that The Marvel Experience is going to be something that’s not just memorable but unforgettable. It’s going to be like nothing you’ve ever seen before. We’ve spent years and time and effort and dollars to make sure that this is an entirely new experience.