Sick of wearing dark glasses in a dark theater? Tired of laying out all that extra cash for a 3-D experience that just doesn’t seem to live up to the hype? Pretty sure that just watching a regular old 2-D pic is all you really need?
Ha! I laugh in your general direction.
Don’t you realize that two or three measly dimensions are for wimps? Thump your chest, grit your teeth, take a deep breath and prepare for … the fourth dimension.
That’s right, now you will see what real movie watching is all about. At least according to a South Korean conglomerate called the CJ Group. They’ve developed a way to give their movie-going patrons all the pizzazz of action blockbusters like Avatar and Pirates of the Caribbean—only with an extra dose of sensory input. The company, which operates Asia’s biggest chain of movie theaters, has already set up special 4-D theaters in South Korea, Thailand and Mexico. And the response has reportedly been phenomenal.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the new 4-D approach has been such a whopping, sold-out success—even though each new 240-seat theater costs about $2 million to install and the tickets set viewers back an extra eight bucks over 3-D prices—that the Korean company is now moving into the U.S. market. They plan to build 200 of the theaters on our shores over the next five years, with the first ones firing up this year in L.A. and New York.
So what is this fourth dimension in movie going? Well, it’s feeling the rumble of an explosion, the breeze in your hair, the splatter of various fluids in your face. The theaters will feature moving seats and install giant fans, strobe lights and nozzles that spray liquids, fogs and smells at you during the movie. The CJ Group has stated that their catalog of selected odors includes about 1,000 different scents that range from “burning rubber” and “gunpowder” to “rose garden.” It takes programmers about two to three weeks at this point to add in all the special effects that impact you through the course of the action.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that smells and vibrations have been experimented with in American cinema. From seat buzzers added to the 1959 horror flick The Tingler to scratch-and-sniff cards that gave new flavor to John Water’s 1981 pic Polyester (and revived most recently with last year’s Spy Kids: All the Time in the World), extra cinematic sensory boosts have been tried again and again. But proponents of the new, all-inclusive flashing, rocking, blowing and spitting approach say there’s no comparison.
“In one nighttime scene in [Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides], when vampire-like mermaids launch an attack on pirates in rowboats, the seats rocked back and forth to simulate the movement of the boats,” the L.A. Times reported. “A fan stirred a gentle breeze, fog filled the theater and a faint smell of the ocean wafted across the audience. When the mermaids shot strands of seaweed at the hapless pirates, moviegoers were sprayed with water. In Prometheus, water sprays simulate something entirely different: the innards of an alien.”
Hmmm. I can see it now. I surprise my wife with a 4-D sci-fi thriller like Prometheus. And we get hit with alien goo blowback, gale force winds and the smell of whatever’s decaying on screen at the moment. It’ll be a date night to remember. Sorta like that time we saw a movie and the guy with a cold behind us couldn’t stop sneezing. Only in this case it’ll be like he’s on my lap.
Oh, this is gonna be big.
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