To celebrate the highly anticipated release of Barbie (2023), Elevate Entertainment partnered with Warner Bros. to create Destination: Barbie Land — a large-scale, immersive pop-up experience that brought Barbie's vibrant world to life. This activation blended nostalgia, innovation, and interactivity, transforming fans into citizens of Barbie Land through experiential storytelling and visually spectacular environments.

The Challenges

For Elevate Entertainment

Creating a physical Barbie Land meant bringing a beloved, decades-old brand to life — one with a deeply established visual identity and a new, progressive tone introduced by the film. Elevate had to strike a delicate balance between honoring the classic Barbie brand and aligning with Director Greta Gerwig's fresh, satirical, and inclusive vision for the film. Elevate also had no existing relationship with Warner Bros., so developing a positive, trusting relationship was imperative.

The event also required building multiple Barbie themed zones, staging crowd-flow management, maintaining interactive installations, and ensuring safety and accessibility — all within a compressed timeline.

With the experience designed for virality, every zone had to be camera-ready under various lighting conditions, support crowd interaction, and feel “Instagrammable” without losing substance.

For Warner Bros. Pictures

Barbie was not just a movie release — it was a cultural event. For Warner Bros., the challenge was how to extend the film's narrative and tone into the real world without diluting its cinematic impact or overwhelming the brand message with spectacle.

Warner Bros. needed the Destination: Barbie Land experience to do more than generate buzz — it had to drive box office success, build brand loyalty, and expand Barbie's reach beyond just kids or longtime fans.

The Solution

For Elevate Entertainment

• Close collaboration with Warner Bros. and other partners ensured consistent brand oversight while allowing room for creative interpretation in set design, character stations, and messaging.
• Elevate assembled a multidisciplinary team of producers, engineers, and creatives to develop a modular build strategy and a streamlined guest journey that could handle high foot traffic efficiently.
• Elevate designed each space with photogenic framing, lighting optimization, and branded storytelling built into each interactive feature, ensuring that content shared by users echoed key themes from the movie.

For Warner Bros.

• Warner Bros. worked hand-in-hand with Elevate to ensure every design choice, activation, and photo op reflected the film's nuanced tone — balancing pop aesthetics with purpose-driven storytelling.
• Warner Bros. and Elevate synchronized the activation with the film's media rollout and influencer campaigns — turning Destination: Barbie Land into a content engine that fed press, social, and ticket conversion.
• Warner Bros. ensured that all experiential elements — from signage to staff training — aligned with the film's core messages of empowerment, diversity, and self-expression, while still embracing fun and camp.

Our Plan

We began by deeply immersing ourselves in the world of Barbie — the film, the brand heritage, and the cultural movement it aimed to spark. Working closely with Warner Bros. and Mattel, we:

• Identified key themes from the film: identity, empowerment, satire, nostalgia, and joy.
• Execute the production and distribution pre-order creative for social, web, and newsletters.
• Defined our creative north star: "Real-World Barbie Land" — a hyper-saturated, self-aware physical space that mirrored the tone of the movie.
• Mapped audience personas: fans, families, film buffs, influencers, and media.

With story and strategy aligned, our team conceptualized a fully immersive environment that blurred the lines between fantasy and reality, rooted in film moments while offering original, interactive elements:

• Designed three thematic zones (The Barbie Disco Dance Floor, Barbie Beach Club, and Barbie Glam Boutique, based on major character arcs and movie locations. We also integrated live dance choreography, DJs, a signature food and drink menu, featured a special release of the Barbie soundtrack, Barbie-style glow-ups from local salons, and offered surprise promotional materials to guests.
• Engineered the space for social media virality, ensuring every angle offered visual impact and shareable moments.
• Created touchpoints of discovery: from hidden easter eggs for superfans to accessible moments for newcomers.

The experience was also designed to generate content at scale:

• Invited key influencers and press to a private pre-opening night.
• Built a media campaign to invite local stations to broadcast on-site.
• Partnered with Warner Bros. to schedule real-time film cross-promotions during the activation period.

The Outcome

• Destination: Barbie Land shattered sales records, delivering the highest ticket sales in the state of Texas.
• 66% lift in guest traffic.
• Delivered the highest occupancy ever for any Elevate Entertainment venue.
• $693,068 in media value, with 57 dedicated articles and 3 local station remotes on-site.
• 630,291 organic impressions from partnered influencers.
• 88,000 organic impressions from social media.

Destination: Barbie Land did more than launch a movie — it ignited a cultural movement. Elevate Entertainment's immersive design turned fans into active participants in Barbie's world, driving emotional connection, virality, and sustained buzz.