Crystal Maze Live Experience
(Picture: Tom Lionetti-Maguire)Seven years ago, Tom Lionetti- Maguire was working as a jobbing actor — including becoming the face of Skyn condoms in France — when he scored a role in an immersive show, Heist, where the audience was induced to commit robbery.
The show changed his life: “I saw first-hand that people were losing their minds for this kind of immediate, active, engaging entertainment in which they had agency upon the narrative — and that was it, I was hooked.”
Lionetti-Maguire — his parents are French-Italian and Irish — set up his own experiential events company, Little Lion. Its first show was the Crystal Maze Live Experience, which launched in 2016 and promptly sold out for 12 months.
Little Lion
Founded: 2016
Staff: 270
Turnover: £10 million
Headquarters: Soho
“I’ve no idea how I went from being an actor to being a producer, or businessman, or whatever I’m doing now, I just did it,” the 35-year-old laughs. “I was calling the gigantic European conglomerate who owned the rights to Crystal Maze from my bedroom at my dad’s house, pretending I was in an office. I was just blagging it.” It worked: he secured an option on the rights, then launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in 2016 that raised £1 million in two weeks.
After the success of the London Crystal Maze show, Lionetti-Maguire booked a second site for it in Manchester — where it’s now the longest running theatrical show in that city — with the West End show now hosting more than a million visitors to date. They include Adele, Cara Delevingne, Skepta, the England rugby team, Arsenal and Manchester United first teams (not together), and Richard O’Brien. “We had a lot of very volatile meetings — never meet your heroes,” Lionetti-Maguire laughs.
The entrepreneur now spends his days moving between the firm’s headquarters on Greek Street and its venues — Camden, which hosts the new Tomb Raider Live Experience, has now joined the Shaftesbury Avenue and Manchester sites, and another show is due to open in Dallas, Texas next year.
Little Lion plans its sets and performances but there are always surprises: “We have had guests arriving on acid and not being able to make it out of the mediaeval zone as they run around screaming,” Lionetti-Maguire reports. “And two guests won an international TripAdvisor competition to stay the night in the Aztec zone, in a ‘Greatest Sleepovers in the World’ feature. But as soon as staff left them… well, you can imagine… the problem was, the security cameras were still on, so they were politely reminded this is a family place, even at night.”
Covid was “tough,” Lionetti-Maguire admits: “We’d had seven years of blood, sweat and tears building up the business, then we were decimated. Furlough helped, but we received absolutely no help from [the Government’s] DCMS or the Arts Council. We were told we ‘were not culturally relevant’. Immersive theatre was denigrated and denied existence by the Arts Council, and we intend to fight that in court. This is a huge industry, a powerful movement in theatre and wider entertainment, and it should be recognised, not pushed aside.”
When Little Lion’s venues reopened, the bounceback was “incredible”, Lionetti-Maguire adds, with like-for-like Crystal Maze sales currently trading 140% against pre-pandemic numbers. The firm has raised almost £5 million from private enquiry backers in 2018 and 2020; it’s also in the process of inking a new deal with a venture capital house.
Success has been swift, but Lionetti- Maguire claims he’s never worried about rivals copying his idea. “There are smaller copycats as well as far bigger companies like Disney who are trying it on a mass scale. But scale isn’t always your friend — when your goal is being ‘immersed’ into the experience, turning 40,000 people into Disney World is the exact antithesis of an immersive experience.”
Expansion is on the horizon. “Over the past 10 years we have honed an engine for what live experiences can be, and that can now be fitted to any [intellectual property] or concept from Grimm’s fairy tales all the way to the newest video-game or blockbuster.”
Little Lion has a new, music-based immersive experience coming to Camden at the end of this year, as well as its first American attraction. “Six new shows are in development and we are talking to Hollywood studios, video-game giants and famous novelists, and even cultivating more niche ideas,” says Lionetti- Maguire. “We plan to open 10 more sites in the next four years. We’re not just a one-trick pony.”
