Adapted versus Original Immersives

Big news hit the escape room community this week: Time Run announced their collaboration with BBC’s Sherlock in an all-new experience, The Game Is Now.

The news got me thinking again about the decision all storytellers make to adapt something existing or to compose something original.

Whether you’re excited or not by the Sherlock fusion, you have to admit: damn, this move is SMART. Here’s a look at why.

Advantages of Adaptation

In developing our immersive theatre escape rooms, Strange Bird has talked a lot about whether to adapt a work or to make something original. It’s a particularly interesting question for the immersive industry—a lot of shows and games are inspired by source material. This topic came up again in development as we started work on Show #2, so here’s my dispatch from those front lines. We boiled adaptation’s advantages down to three…

1. Adaptations can potentially sell more tickets
2. Adaptations give the audience grounding
3. Adaptations give the writer creative parameters

1. financial benefits

We all ultimately want to sell our art, get rich quick, quit our day jobs. That’s not easy in this field. With such a wide-open frontier in the immersive industry, it’s hard to get any attention on your own. Your story is unknown, your company is unknown, hell, even your very genre confuses people when you try to explain it.

But if you create a show from an established brand, you immediately tap into an established fan base. Media and social media suddenly appear and drool. People who’ve never heard of immersive theatre or haven’t ventured into an escape room yet are now snatching up your tickets. Instance: in anticipation of demand, The Game Is Now will open with no fewer than FIVE COPIES of the game. That looks incredibly risky in any other context, but given the established fan base, it makes sense.

Even if you’re not a super-fan of the work, people tend to like things they’re familiar with over something totally new. New things carry risk. We are risk-averse. Risks sometimes pay off, but more often than not, they don’t. We all have favorite places to eat. While I could theoretically find a better or equal Thai restaurant in Houston, why risk the dollars, the calories, and the time on a new place, over the place I know is good? In the same way, we buy tickets for story-worlds we already know something about, rather than starting from ground zero.

It’s not entirely dissimilar to the sunk-cost fallacy.

Hollywood and Broadway have been onto this secret for a while now, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Sponge Bob: the Musical. Did anyone really want Ghost: the Musical? Perhaps not, but once it opened, it became a safe ticket for summer-time tourists. It was total crap, but lo, it even toured.

Taking up an established brand’s very tempting. But just how many works are there that can tap into a rabid fan base or inspire purchases on the “sunk cost fallacy” in entertainment? Unless you work some IP-magical-deal like Time Run did, not many.

INtellectual PropertY (IP) 101

This is a big, sticky area that I’m not an expert in and don’t want to be an expert in, but it’s worth addressing here. Essentially, in the United States, you cannot create within somebody else’s story-world, unless it is in the public domain, that is, published before 1923, or otherwise lapsed in copyright. (Good news: that horizon is about to, at long last, start moving again this year. We’re about to get works through…1924!)

There’s no easy path to acquire IP rights, and if you do connect with the right people, you’re likely in for some serious sticker shock. Only the very biggest of companies can really afford a deal. (See: Time Run, Escape Room Live, Punchdrunk (there’s a Dr. Who immersive in their past)).

You can maybe sneak in under “fair use,” which allows for parody of or commentary on a copyrighted work, but that’s ultimately an act of “crossing your fingers that you never get caught in the first place.” In which case, you better hope you never get big. You’ll almost certainly not have as good of a lawyer as the IP suing you.

There are many escape rooms based on IPs, licensed and unlicensed and hovering in that grey area, and they’re all trying to capitalize on the “established fan base” advantage, hoping a Harry-Potter-style game will be their market differentiator. IP invocations are happening less in the immersive theatre realm in comparison, where we see more shows based on Shakespeare and 19th-Century novelists. A baffling trend, until you realize it’s all about the rule above. Public domain? Fair game!

But I’d argue these adaptations are missing out on the big reason to adapt, which is the financial benefit. “The Dead” is easy to pick on—that’s super-obscure. Houdini is well-known, but I sincerely doubt rabid Houdini fans have made an impact on our bottom line. And let’s be honest: just how many more tickets is Sleep No More selling because of die-hard fans of Macbeth?

We have three avid Shakespearean practitioners on Strange Bird’s creative team, but even we’ve faced the truth that, while people would rather see Hamlet than Pericles, no one is going to an escape room because its billed as Hamlet-based.

2. Audience benefits

But Punchdrunk’s choice to adapt Macbeth has other advantages. It gives people an “in” on the world. Immersives use non-conventional story-telling techniques, and it’s truly bewildering the first time you encounter non-linear story-telling or second-person narratives or sandboxes where you have to choose your own path.

These stories…they don’t hold your hand like the stories we’re used to. They immerse you in the experience and dare you along the way (or at the end) to make sense of it all, if you can. It’s almost as if the story itself—what’s going on here—is the fundamental mystery, and it’s your goal through the experience to solve it. Immersives (even non-escape-room ones) are chock-full of AHA! moments.

Knowing Macbeth intimately helped me make fast sense of what I was seeing in Sleep No More. My very first scene of consequence was the interrogation scene. I quickly recognized Act 4, Scene 3—a brilliant back-and-forth between Malcolm and Macduff which, as a wanna-be-rhetorician, I’ve always loved. Here was that scene, cloaked in a violent dance in a closet, with all of its push and pull. And then…the tree! I laughed out loud, I could not have been more delighted. I was won. I wanted to join their forces. But without the background knowledge, everyone else must be like, “What’s with the Christmas trees?” It becomes a radically different experience if you don’t know the source material.

Then She Fell also uses a well-known work as the string inside their labyrinthine mirror-maze of refracted selves. I read Lewis Carroll’s books for the first time in preparation for this show, and I’m glad I did. It gave me the foundation to see the new thing they were doing with the characters. It’s not a straight adaptation at all, but Alice in Wonderland is unquestionably its spine. (And unlike Macbeth, I think Alice is a public-domain story-world that may actually sell some tickets. See also: Les Enfant Terribles’ Alice’s Adventures Underground. Just…don’t get too close to Disney’s aesthetic choices).

Adaptations can fast-track the audience into engaging with the immersive world. But using an established work as audience hooks does carry risk: you risk leaving behind anyone who hasn’t read it or seen it. We all want the barrier-of-entry for our shows to be as low as possible, and that includes not requiring research ahead of time to get the most out of it.

Basically, you risk becoming fan service. And yeah, Sleep No More really kinda is fan service to Shakespeare nerds. Ugh. I don’t like that. Does it go too far?

More to the point: can we really safely assume an audience is familiar with the details of Hamlet? Yeah, no. Maybe if I were producing in England…maybe.

3. creative benefits

Perhaps the most seductive benefit of adaptation is the on-ramp it gives creators, and I think that’s really what’s behind immersives of The Idiot and “The Dead.” I love limitations. It sparks my creativity. To quote Robert McKee, as he pleads for screenwriters to do research in his phenomenal book Story:

“The principle of Creative Limitation calls for freedom within a circle of obstacles. Talent is like a muscle: without something to push against, it atrophies. So we deliberately put rocks in our path, barriers that inspire.”

Couldn’t agree more. Saying “I want to do something totally original!” more or less means infinite options. Saying “I want to create an escape room based on Hamlet!” gives me a cast of characters, major and minor conflicts, and even suggests sets, if not a particular aesthetic (Hamlet is usually medieval gloom in the public imagination, so why not lean into that).

We’re already working in a wacky, wide-open genre, where the very structure of engagement is up for grabs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some boundaries? Source materials give us that.

The Man From Beyond, while by no measure an adaptation, has deep roots in the true story of Harry Houdini. He suggested a conflict to us, gave us an aesthetic, inspired puzzles (one’s even a historic puzzle, directly lifted from his magic), and even gave us historical films we could play in our show. I read a ton. Watched the movies. Spent days devouring the blog Wild About Harry.

The details…so many rich details, all at our disposal. We knocked out the writing-designing of that game in some 2-3 months. That’s not a coincidence.

Our second show, however, is not going to be “inspired by” anything extant—neither fictional nor historical characters. Which is not to say that there isn’t lots of research to do! I’ve been doing my research, Mr. McKee! But I can say with certainty that the writing process is more challenging. It was not completed in two months. All those rich details we got from Houdini? They’re now up to us to make up.

ADVANTAGES of original work

Which brings us to the other side of things: original stories. Note that original work is not in any way inherently superior to adaptations. They may be harder, but that doesn’t make them better. I think we should have both, and both are capable of magnificent and totally crappy things.

The main benefit of creating something original is that it can speak more directly to the moment. It can go anywhere, do anything, be about anyone. Creators can say directly what it is they want to say—rather than twisting Hamlet into some cautionary tale of fascism, or making Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf suddenly about racism.

If all we’re doing is re-mounting old stories, we’re stuck as a culture. We won’t have any stories of historically marginalized groups as protagonists, heroes, anti-heroes. There may be only seven plots, but the details matter. A LOT. Times change, and we require new stories to understand ourselves as we are and to unlock the frontiers of what we can yet become.

But they are harder. In immersives in particular, original stories will need to work harder to tell the tale—there’s no “string” in the chaos for your audience to follow. You’ll need to set-up and then deliver “AHA!” moments on your own. The audience has no preconceived investment in any of the characters, so you’re building their emotions from the ground up. Extra care must be taken.

And dammit, there are NO FINANCIAL BENEFITS to original work. NONE. Except, I suppose, not having to give the BBC a percentage.