The Conversation Continues

I was genuinely surprised by the response to my last article, "Why Most Immersive Experiences Fail to Bring Visitors Back." It clearly hit a nerve. My inbox filled up. The comments kept coming. And one theme dominated the conversation: storytelling.

Yes, storytelling matters. I argued that we need actual narratives with characters, conflict, and stakes instead of abstract visual journeys. Many of you agreed. Some pushed back. All of it was valuable.

But here's the thing: that article was about storytelling within a single experience. What I really want to talk about is something bigger.

What if the experience was just one chapter in a story that extends far beyond it?

I know this touches on IP strategy, and yes, budget. For the sake of this conversation, let's set budget aside. Let's assume we have the resources to do this right. Because I want to explore what's actually possible when we stop thinking about stories as things that happen inside dark rooms.

The Dark Box Problem

Think about how we consume stories from major franchises today.

A studio spends hundreds of millions developing characters, worlds, and narratives. They craft every detail. They build lore that superfans will dissect for years. And then what do they do with all of it?

They lure you into a dark box and show it to you.

That's it. That's the model. Whether it's a cinema, your living room, or a VR headset, the fundamental approach hasn't changed. Sit down. Watch. Consume. The story happens to you while you remain passive.

Sure, the boxes have gotten better. Higher resolution. Spatial audio. Bigger screens. But it's still the same paradigm: story as broadcast.

Why does it need to be like this?

Technology has evolved. Interaction with content can be dynamic. The level of commitment to a story can be personalized. We have location data, mobile devices, real-time rendering, sensor networks, AI that can adapt narratives on the fly.

Yet we're still herding people into dark rooms like it's 1920.

Maybe the Movie Isn't the Point

Here's something that hit me while writing this: we're so conditioned to think about movies and series as the center of the story universe that we can barely talk about storytelling without defaulting to that framing.

"The movie comes out in June." "The series drops next month." "The film is the main event."

But why?

Why is the two-hour theatrical cut the main driver? Why is the eight-episode season the thing everything else orbits around? These are just formats. They're just delivery mechanisms. They're just one way, a century-old way, of packaging narrative.

What if we stopped treating the movie as the sun and everything else as satellites?

What if the movie was just one deliverable within a larger story? An important one, sure. A high-production-value one. But not the center. Just one node in a narrative ecosystem that includes immersive experiences, location-based interactions, digital trails, community-driven events, and whatever else serves the story.

This isn't diminishing film. It's liberating it. When the movie doesn't have to carry the entire weight of the franchise, it can focus on what it does best: spectacle, emotion, cinematic craft. The world-building, the lore, the deep engagement? That can live elsewhere, in formats better suited to it.

The story is the product. Everything else, movies, series, experiences, games, events, is just how you deliver it.

What If the Story Escaped?

Let me paint a picture that might sound wild. Stay with me.

You're walking to work on a Tuesday morning. Your phone buzzes. Not a notification you recognize. Something different. A message that feels... off. A video. Grainy. A location you don't recognize at first, but then you realize it's three blocks from where you're standing.

You're intrigued. You tap through. There's a puzzle here. A trail. Something is happening in your city, right now, and you've just been invited in.

This is how the story starts. Not in a theater. Not on your couch. On your commute.

Now imagine this is the lead-up to a major franchise release:

A horror film like Terrifier: That creepy clown starts appearing. First in geo-targeted content. Then in AR overlays at specific locations. Then reports start surfacing, "sightings" that blur the line between marketing and reality. By the time the movie releases, you haven't just seen trailers. You've been looking over your shoulder for weeks.

An adventure franchise like Indiana Jones: You get pulled into a quest. Real locations in your city become puzzle pieces. Historical landmarks suddenly have secrets. You're decoding symbols, following trails, piecing together a mystery that eventually leads you to... a screening? An immersive experience? A location-based event where the story continues?

A sci-fi universe like Dune: Subtle signals start appearing. Encrypted messages. Strange symbols on digital billboards that only certain people notice. You're being recruited into something. A faction, a resistance, a mystery. The world-building starts months before release, and you're not watching it unfold. You're in it.

This isn't marketing. This is the story itself, escaping the black box and living in the world.

Designing for Different Depths

Here's where it gets interesting from a design perspective.

Not everyone wants to decode ARG (Alternate Reality Game, an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform and unfolds through puzzles, clues, and audience participation) puzzles on their morning commute. Not everyone wants to spend weeks unraveling a mystery before a movie release. Some people just want to buy a ticket, sit down, and enjoy two hours of entertainment.

And that's completely fine.

The mistake would be designing only for the highly engaged. The opportunity is designing for multiple levels of engagement simultaneously.

Think of it as concentric circles:

• The Core: The movie, the main experience, the thing everyone can access and enjoy without any prior engagement. This has to work perfectly on its own. No homework required. No "you had to be there" moments that alienate casual viewers.
  
  
  
• The Engaged Layer: For those who want more, there's more. The story extends before and after the main experience. Location-based interactions. Digital trails. Narrative threads that deepen your understanding but aren't required for enjoyment.
  
  
  
• The Deep Layer: For the superfans, the ones who want to live in this world, there's infrastructure for that. Ongoing storylines. Community-driven narrative branches. Experiences that reward deep investment with genuinely unique content.

The beautiful thing? Each layer feeds the others.

The Engaged Audience as Story Engine

Here's an idea that might make traditional content creators uncomfortable:

What if your most engaged audience helped create the story?

Not in a focus-group, "tell us what you want" way. But structurally. By design.

Imagine an immersive experience, like the ones I described in my previous article, where groups of 25-100 people make meaningful choices that affect the narrative. Different groups make different choices. The story branches.

Now imagine those branches persist.

When the next group enters, the world has been shaped by the previous group's decisions. The engaged audience isn't just consuming the story. They're steering it. Their choices create variations that become part of the canonical experience.

This does something remarkable: it makes your content self-generating.

The creator builds the framework, the rules, the possibility space. The engaged audience explores that space and creates paths through it. The casual audience experiences the results of those explorations.

Every visit is different. Not because you programmed a thousand variations, but because the community created them through play.

This is how games have worked for years. MMOs. Emergent narratives. Player-driven stories. The immersive experience industry has barely scratched this surface.

The Conversion Funnel Nobody's Building

Every touchpoint between engaged and passive audience is a conversion opportunity.

Someone shows up to the immersive experience just wanting a fun night out. They're the casual audience. But while they're there, they see the engaged participants doing something different. Following threads they didn't know existed, uncovering layers they couldn't see.

That's the moment. That's when passive becomes curious. Curious becomes engaged. Engaged becomes invested.

And it works the other way too. Someone deep in the ARG, following every trail, finally arrives at the immersive experience. The physical manifestation of the story they've been living. For them, it's not just entertainment. It's a pilgrimage.

Now imagine these conversion points designed intentionally throughout the entire story ecosystem:

• The billboard that most people walk past, but that responds if you engage
• The social content that works as entertainment, but rewards deeper investigation
• The movie that stands alone, but contains easter eggs that unlock extended content
• The immersive experience that's fun for everyone, but transformative for those who arrive prepared
• The post-experience content that keeps the story alive, but deepens based on how you participated

Each touchpoint is complete in itself. Each touchpoint is also a doorway.

The Business Case Nobody's Making

Let me talk about money for a moment.

The current model for franchise storytelling is essentially: make a thing, sell tickets to the thing, hope the thing does well enough to justify making another thing.

It's hit-driven. It's volatile. A single underperformance can kill a franchise. There's no compounding. No recurring relationship. No long-term revenue model beyond "hope people keep showing up for sequels."

Now imagine the alternative:

Continuity. An ongoing story that doesn't end when credits roll. An ecosystem of touchpoints that generates revenue continuously, not just during release windows. Ticket sales become one revenue stream among many: experiences, content, merchandise, events, all connected by narrative.

Conversion. Every casual viewer is a potential engaged fan. Every engaged fan is a potential superfan. The funnel exists by design, not by accident. You're not just selling tickets. You're building an audience relationship that compounds over time.

Compounding content. When your engaged audience helps generate narrative variations, your content library grows without linear production costs. The framework you build once supports experiences that evolve indefinitely.

Data. Real engagement data. Not just box office numbers, but actual understanding of how people interact with your story, which threads they follow, which choices they make, what resonates and what doesn't.

A single hit movie might gross a billion dollars over its theatrical run. What's the value of an ongoing story ecosystem that generates nine figures annually for a decade?

The math isn't even close.

A Direct Channel to the Audience That Matters

And there's another opportunity studios are missing entirely.

Right now, marketing is spray and pray. You buy billboards. You flood social media. You target demographics and hope the algorithm finds the right people. Most of that spend is wasted on people who were never going to care.

But what if you had a direct line to your most engaged audience?

When you build a story ecosystem with meaningful touchpoints, not just passive billboards but interactive experiences, narrative trails, participatory content, you're not just entertaining people. You're building a channel. A relationship. A way to reach the exact audience that moves the needle.

These aren't just consumers. They're ambassadors.

When a new movie is coming, you don't need to outspend competitors on media buys. You activate your engaged audience. They tell their networks. They create anticipation. They convert their friends from passive to curious.

This is marketing that doesn't feel like marketing because it isn't. It's the story continuing. It's the next chapter arriving. And your most invested audience becomes the distribution mechanism.

Compare that to hoping your trailer goes viral.

The Technology Is Ready. Are You?

Everything I've described is technically possible today.

Location-based services can deliver content based on where you are. AR can overlay narrative onto the real world. Real-time engines can adapt stories based on audience input. AI can help manage branching narratives at scale. Sensor networks can track engagement in physical spaces. Mobile devices put a story portal in everyone's pocket.

The technology isn't the blocker. The imagination is.

We have tools that let stories escape the black box, live in the world, adapt to their audiences, and grow through participation. We're using them to make better trailers and face filters.

A Plea to the Industry

Please, please: don't assume your audience doesn't want this.

And if they don't seem to want it? You probably did it wrong.

Don't test it with leftover budget and gimmicky executions. Don't slap AR on a poster and call it innovation. Don't create a face filter and declare that audiences "aren't ready" when it doesn't move the needle.

Of course it doesn't move the needle. You're testing the wrong thing.

Test the story. Test the depth. Test what happens when you invite people into a narrative that lives in their world, adapts to their engagement level, and rewards their investment with genuine meaning.

Test it properly. Fund it properly. Design it properly.

Because I promise you: the audience that falls in love with a story they can live in will be worth more than a hundred million passive viewers who watched once and moved on.

Why This Matters Beyond Entertainment

I've been talking about movies, franchises, and IP. But if you're in the business world reading this and thinking "interesting, but not relevant to me," hold on.

Everything I just described applies to your brand too.

Think about it. What is a brand if not a story? You have characters (your team, your founders, your customers). You have a narrative (why you exist, what problem you solve, where you're going). You have a world (your industry, your market, your ecosystem). You have values, conflict, stakes.

You have all the raw material for a story. You're just not telling it that way.

Instead, most B2B companies do exactly what Hollywood does with their dark boxes. They create content. They broadcast it. They hope people consume it. Whitepapers. Webinars. Trade show booths. LinkedIn posts. Product demos. All of it pushed at an audience that's supposed to sit passively and absorb.

Sound familiar?

Your Trade Show Booth Is a Black Box

You spend six figures on a booth at a major industry event. You staff it with your best people. You hand out brochures. You do demos. You scan badges.

And then what? You go home with a list of leads that your sales team will cold-call until most of them go dark.

What if your booth was a story instead?

What if visitors didn't just watch a demo but participated in something? What if they made choices that revealed different aspects of your solution based on their specific challenges? What if the engaged visitors, the ones who really leaned in, became the story engine for the passive visitors walking by?

What if your presence at the trade show was just one touchpoint in an ongoing narrative that started before the event and continued after?

The same principles apply. Multiple levels of engagement. Active participants and engaged observers. Conversion points between passive and invested. A story that lives beyond the confines of a single interaction.

Your Product Has a Story. Tell It.

Every product solves a problem. Every problem has stakes. Every solution has a journey.

That's narrative structure. Beginning, middle, end. Conflict and resolution. Transformation.

Most companies flatten this into feature lists and ROI calculators. They strip out everything that makes a story compelling and replace it with bullet points.

What if instead you built an ecosystem of touchpoints that let customers experience the story at different depths?

The casual prospect gets the high-level narrative: here's the problem, here's how we solve it, here's what changes. Complete. Satisfying. No homework required.

The engaged prospect goes deeper: case studies that read like stories, interactive tools that let them explore scenarios, content that rewards investigation.

The invested customer becomes part of the story: their implementation becomes a chapter, their success becomes proof, their advocacy becomes the mechanism that brings in the next customer.

Each layer feeds the others. Just like with entertainment IP.

The Real Competitive Advantage

Here's what most business leaders miss: in a world where products are increasingly commoditized, story becomes the differentiator.

Your competitor can copy your features. They can match your pricing. They can hire away your talent. They can replicate your go-to-market strategy.

They can't copy a story that your customers are living inside.

When your brand isn't just something people buy but something they participate in, when they're not just customers but characters in an ongoing narrative, you've built something defensible. Something that compounds. Something that turns transactions into relationships.

This is what the entertainment industry is slowly figuring out. Stories that escape the black box create deeper engagement, longer relationships, and more sustainable business models.

The same is true for every business. Whether you're selling software, manufacturing equipment, professional services, or consumer goods, you have a story. The question is whether you're broadcasting it from a dark box or letting your audience live inside it.

The Story Wants Out

Here's what I believe:

We're at an inflection point. The technology to liberate storytelling from the black box exists. The audience appetite for deeper engagement exists. The business case for ongoing narrative ecosystems exists.

What's missing is courage. The willingness to think beyond "make content, show content, sell tickets to content." The imagination to see stories as living things that can escape their containers and exist in the world.

I get it. Doing something that feels new, implementing different approaches, challenging workflows you've followed for years? It's not easy. It's scary. Careers were built on the old model. Entire organizations are structured around it. The inertia is real.

But I'm not advocating for overnight revolution. You don't have to burn everything down and start over. What I am saying is: start moving.

Take steps in the right direction. Run tests. Build small experiments that generate real data. Get convincing metrics you can bring to your C-level. Prove the concept before you bet the company on it.

But get moving. Because what we knew worked? That's in the past. We've squeezed what we could out of existing workflows and approaches. The returns are diminishing. The audiences are fragmenting. The old playbook is showing its age.

The question isn't whether storytelling will evolve beyond the black box. It will. The question is whether you'll be leading that evolution or scrambling to catch up.

And to be clear: when I say black box, I mean it broadly. It's the cinema. It's the living room TV. It's the laptop. It's the phone held six inches from your face. It's the 2D screen in all its forms. The rectangle we've been staring at for over a century, waiting for stories to be delivered to us.

The black box served us well. But stories don't have to live there anymore.

It's time to let them out.