‘You’re part of the tornado’: the summer of moviegoing game-changer 4DX

During this long, hot, languishing summer, I have come to believe in one thing and one thing only: seeing Twisters in 4DX. The Oklahoma-set film, directed by Lee Isaac Chung, is about a 7/10 movie in 2D – a blockbuster sequel of sorts to the 1996 disaster flick, starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones as tornado chasers with modest chemistry. But in the immersive theatrical format known as 4DX, in which viewers are buffeted with literal wind and rain, Twisters becomes an unmissable 10/10 experience.

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In 4DX, you feel every bump and jolt of a truck in an F5 gale, thanks to moving seats that, among other things, punch you in the back and tickle your ankles. When the characters clung to bolted theater seats during a final climactic storm, I too clung to my armrest, lest I get rattled off my wind-ripped chair. Each of the film’s tornado encounters drew 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 do not just, in the words of Powell’s Tyler Owens, “ride” the storm. You are the storm.

I’m not alone in my glowing assessment. Though 4DX has existed in the US for a decade – it first arrived for Transformers: Age of Extinction in 2014 – Twisters marked a high point for the format, which is enjoying a breakout summer. The film broke a domestic box office record for 4DX with $2.3m from 62 US auditoriums during opening weekend. Viral TikToks captured the experience of leaving a Twisters screening with streaked mascara, jostling in the theaters’ 4-chair pods and seeing God (with your shocked parents) in the wind tunnel. A week later, Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed Twisters’ record with $2.8m, giving 4DX its two most successful weekends to date back to back. 4DX, the second most popular of so-called “premium large format” viewing options to Imax, accounted for a solid portion of this month’s box office for Alien: Romulus.

“The premium formats, including 4DX and Imax, are seeing a total renaissance,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Comscore. “While people complain a lot about the cost of movie tickets, it seems like the audiences don’t mind opting in and paying the premium to get that experience for certain movies.” For an average of $8 more than a standard ticket, viewers can feel Dune’s sandworm thumpers in their core, simulate the zero gravity terror of Alien and shriek through a tornado. The Twisters hype built on a few years of post-pandemic enthusiasm for big, bold theatrical experiences – anything to differentiate from the couch. “All of the stars aligned for us on Twisters,” Duncan Macdonald, the head of worldwide marketing and theater development for 4DX company CJ 4DPlex Americas, said. “We had been stuck inside so long and the theaters were closed for so long that they wanted to see something different, and 4DX provided that.”

The summer of 4DX owes largely to a team of artists – though the company calls them “editors” – based in Seoul, South Korea, who adapt anywhere from 35-40 Hollywood titles per year, and around 70-80 non-Hollywood titles. Since 2009, the studio has enhanced some 1,050 films – everything from horror to Fast & Furious fare to Pixar movies – with 4DX effects such as smell (gardenia, Beauty and the Beast rose, Wonka chocolate), weather, lights and chair programming adapted from military flight simulators. What started as an experiment by South Korean movie chain CJ CGV has now landed in 792 theaters globally, including 63 in the US and Canada, according to the company.

The editors take over once almost all post-production is finished, usually about a month before a film’s release. The team then go through the film scene by scene or, in the case of a particularly intense action sequence, frame by frame, to choreograph chair movements and fine-tune effects to shifting points of view. Decisions must be made on which elements to highlight and which to downplay at what moment – in the case of Twisters, do you focus on the experience of the battered truck, or the wind? During one storm scene, the 4DX experience “starts off with the truck and you feel every little bump”, said Paul Hyon Kim, the senior vice-president of content and production for CJ 4DPlex. As a tornado forms in the distance, the seat bumps consistent with the truck diminish in favor of the sweeping gusts and smoother 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,” said Kim.

“It’s a very, very creative process,” he added, as well as a collaborative one; each team has a lead editor and pitch internally to the studio’s chief editor, Cindy Lee, who has edited 300 titles herself 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 kind of pull away from,” said Kim.

It takes about two weeks to adapt a two-hour title into 4DX, which then gets sign-off from the requisite film-makers and studio representatives. Outside viewers will occasionally offer input – Kim noted that the idea to keep the chairs attuned to Dune: Part Two’s thumpers, which attract the spectacular sandworms, even when they weren’t on screen, emerged during a quality check session with Warner Bros representatives. “It’s going to be a little bit in your subconscious, but there’s this level of suspense that’s just building up,” he said. “I don’t know how many people will be able to point that out, but I guarantee you that was an elevated experience from without it.”

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So far, there’s little concern that 4DX’s borderline amusement park fare, in which it’s somewhat acceptable to have one’s phone out to record the ride, will replace standard cinema, though CJ 4DPlex does have plans to expand into more theaters. But Kim can foresee a future in which Hollywood directors, like some South Korean ones before them, make movies with the 4DX experience in mind, similar to how Hollywood auteurs like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve film with intention for Imax. “We’re finding that a lot more film-makers are interested in 4DX, and so I think it’s only a matter of time before we see big budget blockbuster films really take into account the 4DX offerings and what you can and cannot do in a 4DX theater when you’re shooting the film,” he said.

For all the enthusiasm, the limit remains the number of domestic 4DX theaters (mostly operated by Regal, owned by Cineworld), the amount theaters are willing to pay upfront to install what are essentially mini rollercoasters, and the number of movies for which the 4D treatment makes sense. (In the coming months, the company plans to adapt big-budget swings such as Gladiator 2, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Wicked.) “The movie is at the center of this and this is meant to enhance the movie-going experience, not to replace the movie,” said Dergarabedian.

And should options run short, there are always classic titles; last month, CJ 4DPlex announced the 4DX version of the original Twister, alongside the returns of the new Twisters 4DX, on Labor Day weekend, building on an existing catalog of updated-for-4DX films including the Nightmare Before Christmas and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Whether you opt for the $8 extra rollercoaster experience or stick to 2D, the hype around 4DX is a boon for movie theaters still desperate to get audiences back in any version of seats post-pandemic. “You’ve got to get people back into the movie theaters, and how do you do that? You can’t do something that’s just strictly a larger screen when everyone’s got an 85in TV at home,” said Kim. “We think that 4DX does a really, really good job of doing something different.” And if you see Twisters back in 4DX this weekend – make sure you get a lid for your popcorn, and bring a sweater.