For most of its life, Netflix asked nothing of its subscribers except a screen. The executive who spent the past seven years persuading them to get off the sofa, and to pay to walk into the worlds of its biggest series, is now leaving the company himself.

As Deadline first reported, Greg Lombardo has exited Netflix after more than seven years, most recently as VP Creative and Production, Global Experiences. Deadline calls it a major change in the streamer’s live-experiences operation. In his latest role Lombardo reported to Mitzi Reaugh, VP and general manager of Global Experiences, and no successor has been named.

His signature project is Netflix House, the brick-and-mortar venues at King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia and at Galleria Dallas. Both mix live experiences, dining and branded merchandise built around Netflix titles such as Stranger Things, Wednesday, Squid Game, Bridgerton and KPop Demon Hunters. It is the theme-park logic applied to a streaming catalogue: the series is the ride, and the subscription becomes only one of the ways a fan pays.

Lombardo also spearheaded Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience, the touring event that recreates the series’ Regency ballroom for paying guests, and the upcoming KPop Demon Hunters world tour, which takes the company’s animated hit on the road.

The move into physical venues was hardly improvised. Before Netflix, Lombardo was CEO of Offshore Surf, an indoor-outdoor surfing venture, and earlier served as SVP Global Location Based Entertainment at Fox Filmed Entertainment, after a stint at the experience-design firm BRC Imagination Arts. Netflix hired him in July 2019 as VP, Head of Live Experiences.

The timing adds to a week of turnover in Netflix’s marketing ranks. Deadline counts Lombardo as the second high-profile marketing executive to leave in a week, after the exit of Pam Levine, the company’s marketing and publicity VP for the U.S. and Canada. TheWrap reports that a third Netflix House is set to open in Las Vegas next year, and that a KPop Demon Hunters experience is due at the existing venues later this year.

That means the next doors of the operation Lombardo designed, from the Las Vegas House to the KPop Demon Hunters tour, will open without the person who drew up the plans.

Tags: Netflix, executive-move, Bridgerton, KPop Demon Hunters, Greg Lombardo, Netflix House

Greg Lombardo, the Netflix executive who built Netflix House, exits after seven years

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