Cinematic Atmosphere
Davis shared the success of the Los Angeles location helped his team—co-led by Joanne Haruta, the co-founder—spin-off into Las Vegas, but then 2020 happened. “We were off to Vegas before [the Vernon location] closed due to covid. But we were conceptualizing what to do as a sequel before the pandemic hit,” he said, “And so we’re sitting there going, ‘What direction do we want to go when we get to Vegas? Do we want to stay in H.G. Wells or do we want to go Jules Verne?’ You know, there’s not a lot of other great choices. It’s going to be one of those two. And so we settled in on 20,000 Leagues—we wanted to do something that was a riff on it. The submarine bus was probably the coolest thing we had, so we basically blew the bus up to scale and then went, ‘What does the dining room underwater look like?’ We started watching all the Georges Méliès movies and going, ‘What would Méliès do?’”
