DOver this long, hot, exhausting summer, I’ve come to believe in one thing: seeing Twisters in 4DX. The Oklahoma-set film, directed by Lee Isaac Chung, is a 7/10 movie in 2D, a sort of blockbuster sequel to the 1996 disaster movie starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones as tornado chasers with modest chemistry. But in the immersive cinematic format known as 4DX, where viewers are literally buffeted by wind and rain, Twisters becomes a 10/10 must-see experience.
In 4DX, you feel every jolt of a truck in an F5 gale, thanks to moving seats that, among other things, slap you in the back and tickle your ankles. When characters clung to bolted-down theater seats during a climactic final storm, I clung to my armrest, too, lest I topple out of my wind-shredded chair. Each of the film’s tornado encounters elicited loud cheers at my screening, as did the shot of Powell in a tight white T-shirt during a palpable drizzle. I emerged from Twisters with tangled hair and horizontal tear streaks; my friend lost her shoe. In 4DX, you don’t just, in the words of Powell’s Tyler Owens, “ride” the storm. are The storm.
I am not alone in my Brilliant evaluationThough 4DX has been around in the US for a decade (it first arrived with Transformers: Age of Extinction in 2014), Twisters marked a high point for the format, which is enjoying a wildly successful summer. broke a national box office record for 4DX with $2.3 million from 62 U.S. theaters during opening weekend. Viral TikToks captured the experience of leaving a Twisters screening with striped mascara, Pushing around in the four-seat rooms of the theaters and seeing god (with his parents in shock) in the wind tunnel. A week later, Deadpool and Wolverine surpassed Twisters’ record-breaking $2.8 million gave 4DX its two most successful weekends to date in a row. 4DX, the second most popular so-called “premium large format” viewing option after Imax, accounted for a solid share of this month’s revenue. Alien: Romulus Box Office.
“Premium formats, including 4DX and Imax, are experiencing a total renaissance,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “While people complain a lot about the cost of movie tickets, it seems moviegoers don’t mind opting to pay the premium to get that experience at certain films.” For an average of $8 more than a standard ticket, viewers can feel the sandworms of Dune inside them, simulate the zero-gravity terror of Alien and scream through a tornado. The hype over Twisters was built on a few years of Post-pandemic enthusiasm for big, bold theatrical experiences – anything that sets them apart from the couch. “All the stars aligned for us on Twisters,” said Duncan Macdonald, director of global marketing and theater development for 4DX company CJ 4DPlex Americas. “We had been cooped up for so long and movie theaters had been closed for so long that they wanted to see something different, and 4DX provided that.”
The summer of 4DX owes much to a team of artists — though the company calls them “editors” — based in Seoul, South Korea, who adapt 35 to 40 Hollywood titles a year, and about 70 to 80 non-Hollywood titles. Since 2009, the studio has enhanced some 1,050 films — from horror movies to Fast and Furious films to Pixar movies — with 4DX effects such as smells (gardenia, rose from Beauty and the Beast, Wonka’s chocolate), weather, lighting and chair programming adapted from military flight simulators. What began as an experiment by South Korean theater chain CJ CGV has now reached 792 theaters around the world, including 63 in the U.S. and Canada, according to the company.
Editors take over once nearly all post-production is finished, usually about a month before a film’s release. The crew then goes through the film scene by scene or, in the case of a particularly intense action sequence, frame by frame, to choreograph chair movements and adjust effects to changing viewpoints. Decisions must be made about which elements to highlight and which to de-emphasize at each moment — in the case of Twisters, do you focus on the experience of the wrecked truck or on the wind? During a storm scene, the 4DX experience “starts with the truck, and you feel every little bump,” said Paul Hyon Kim, senior vice president of content and production at CJ 4DPlex. As a tornado forms in the distance, the seat bumps — consistent with the truck — diminish in favor of the wind gusts and gentler movements of the tornado, drawing the audience into the larger storm — “you’re now focused on the tornado, you’re now part of the tornado,” Kim said.
“It’s a very, very creative process,” she added, and a collaborative one; each team has a lead editor and pitches internally to the studio’s editor-in-chief, Cindy Lee, who has edited 300 titles over 15 years. “With that experience, you really start to develop a nuance and a feel and an expertise as to what you need to emphasize or what you need to move away from,” Kim said.
It takes about two weeks to adapt a two-hour title to 4DX, which then receives approval from the filmmakers and representatives of the relevant studios. Outside viewers will occasionally offer feedback: Kim noted that the idea to keep chairs attuned to the thumps of Dune: Part Two — which attract the spectacular sandworms — even when they weren’t on screen came about during a quality-control session with representatives from Warner Bros. “It’s going to be a little bit in your subconscious, but there’s a level of suspense that builds up,” he said. “I don’t know how many people will be able to point to it, but I guarantee you it was a superior experience without it.”
So far, there aren’t many concerns that the 4DX experience — which is on the verge of amusement parks and where it’s acceptable to have your phone out to record the ride — will replace the standard movie theater, though CJ 4DPlex has plans to expand to more theaters. But Kim can foresee a future where Hollywood directors, like some South Koreans before them, make movies with the 4DX experience in mind, similar to how Hollywood auteurs like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve film with the intention of shooting for Imax. “We’re finding that a lot more filmmakers are interested in 4DX, and so I think it’s only a matter of time before we see big-budget blockbuster movies that really take into account 4DX offerings and what you can and can’t do in a 4DX theater when you’re shooting the movie,” he said.
For all the enthusiasm, the limit remains the number of home 4DX theaters (mostly operated by Cineworld-owned Regal), how much theaters are willing to pay up front to install what are essentially mini roller coasters and the number of movies for which the 4D treatment makes sense. (In the coming months, the company plans to adapt big-budget films like Gladiator 2, Beetlejuice and Wicked.) “Film is at the center of this and this is meant to enhance the movie-going experience, not replace film,” Dergarabedian said.
And if options are scarce, there are always classic titles; last month, CJ 4DPlex announced the 4DX version of the original Twister, along with the return of the all-new Twisters 4DX on Labor Day weekend, building on an existing catalog of 4DX-updated films including The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Whether you opt for the extra $8 roller coaster experience or stick with 2D, the excitement around 4DX is a boon for theaters still desperate to get audiences back into any version of seating after the pandemic. “You have to get people back into theaters, and how do you do that? You can’t do something that’s strictly a bigger screen when everyone has an 85-inch TV at home,” Kim said. “We think 4DX does a really, really good job of doing something different.” And if you do go see Twisters in 4DX again this weekend, be sure to get a lid for your popcorn and bring a sweater.
