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- 4DX Gives a Big Boost to "Twisters"
Hola Hollywood tech nerds!
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4DX Gives a Big Boost to Twisters
Twisters had a bigger-than-expected box office opening this past weekend, making my jokes about its omnipresent trailers seem pretty foolish!
Last week I wrote a bit about some of Twisters’ surprisingly old school blockbuster production decisions, in light of its boffo box office I thought this week I’d point out something interesting about where some of those numbers came from, courtesy of Forbes:
One factor that could be contributing to its massive appeal is the film’s strong performance on 4DX screens. Ticket sales for 4DX were about $2.1 million, which is 30% higher than the previous record holder, “Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which grossed $1.57 million for 4DX in 2023, Variety reported.
@oliverosalexae Intense and so many tornado scenes!!🌪️ go see this movie in 4DX cinema!! @twistersmovie #fyp #twistersmovie
4DX is a theatrical format in select cinemas, where seats are equipped to move, jostle, vibrate, lift, dip, and occasionally attack you with water, air jets, a back-punching mechanism, and what my moviegoing companion referred to as a “little tickler” near the ankles. In my experience having seen four 4DX films (amounting to 16DX), the more aggressive, full-contact effects are deployed sparingly, if not tastefully, so don’t let them turn you off from the whole concept. The theater is also equipped for lightning flashes, rising fog, and huge gusts of wind, which go absolutely perfectly with this material. So perfect that you need to run, not walk, to see Twisters in 4DX.
As a lover of the movie theater experience, one of the things I’ve tried to get across in this newsletter is the importance of event and spectacle to attract more moviegoers. It’s 2024, many folks have big, beautiful TVs with top tier sound systems at home. How do you draw them out?
You do it with immersive theater experiences like Twisters, the Las Vegas Sphere, and IMAX; with cultural events like “Barbenheimer” and Dune: Part Two; with attention-getting marketing like Longlegs; and finally, with an understanding that relying on strictly straight-to-streaming content is not the basis for a sound business model, a lesson that the streamers appear to finally be learning.
Your Regularly-Scheduled AI Updates
After a month of not spending time writing on the seemingly-eternal/annoying topic of AI, there are a few entertainment-related AI stories that might interest you, my dear reader.
IATSE members ratified both the 2024-2027 Hollywood Basic Agreement and the 2024-2027 Area Standards Agreement, which included a number of stipulations related to AI use
Despite the SAG and WGA strikes last year, studios are still implementing some questionable AI use, as detailed by Variety
Runway is hoping to sell fine-tuning (“a process of training a pre-trained AI model on a curated dataset to create a smaller new model, which is then capable of producing more specific kinds of outputs”) models to Hollywood studios
My take is that we’ve moved past some of the most intense parts of the AI hype cycle, and the next year or two will demonstrate whether these products are actually capable of the big promises tech has made, or if they will just turn out to be occasionally-useful tools.
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
CrowdStrike is the ultimate symbol of the tech industry’s rot. (link)
Posting to Instagram is like turning on a lightbulb forever. (link)
Is social media as bad for you as tobacco? (link)