Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is coming out on September 6, so you can buy tickets for it now the regular way, or you can do it in Roblox.
The new experience, called BeetleJuice: Escape the Afterlife, is, according to the store page, a game where you have to help characters escape the afterlife by teaming up with Beetlejuice, a character who was the villain in the original movie. You’ll enter three “immersive worlds” to rescue Delia, Lydia, and Astrid (Lydia’s daughter).
What separates this from just being a video game tie-in is that you can go to a virtual Fandango box office and buy tickets for the movie, which will then reward you with an exclusive avatar item.
Beyond just the game itself, Warner Bros. partnered with four of the platform’s most popular games — Barry’s Prison Run, Carry a Friend!, Escape a Running Head, and The Floor is Lava — to usher players into Escape the Afterlife and give them the opportunity to earn tokens.
“By leveraging the vast Roblox creator community, we are not only able to connect with existing Beetlejuice fans, but also have the opportunity to reach new audiences who are being introduced to him for the first time. And we are thrilled to be the first studio to test ticketing on the platform,” Cameron Curtis, executive vice president of marketing for Warner Bros., said in a press release.
To counter concerns that the box office would allow users 13 and under to purchase tickets, Warner Bros. said that minor accounts will only be able to play the game, not buy anything. There also doesn’t appear to be anything in the store at the time of this writing; players can just earn Beetlejuice tokens by playing Escape the Afterlife or any of the partnered games.
This partnership continues Roblox’s recent aggressive push into branded crossovers and overall commerce. While brands have experimented with Roblox’s platform in the past, there have been a number of official experiences over the past few months. Furniture conglomerate Ikea sought to hire virtual customer service employees for an Ikea store inside Roblox, while Bandai Namco teamed up with Roblox to release an official Pac-Man game.
This is positioning Roblox to be one of the top “metaverse” platforms, especially if we’re talking about hubs where players can go to different “worlds” and buy virtual items.
