Underneath all the bombastic movie-studio presentations and fancy displays touting new technology, there’s a distinct hint of desperation at CinemaCon, the annual trade convention for the National Association of Theater Owners. Right before the beginning of this year’s convention at Caesars Palace last week, word got out that major studios were considering new premium VOD options to bring first-run movies to home video just weeks or even days after their release in theaters. Moves like that further erode the power of the movie-theater industry, which has worked hard to compensate for increased home viewing with advances in luxury and technology, most of which get launched at CinemaCon.
Walking the trade-show floor this year, I saw plenty of plush seating and 4D immersive systems, which shake and prod viewers in sync with the movies onscreen. And I ate plenty of samples of junk food being pushed for theater concession stands, where the majority of the money is made. But all of that stuff is old news, really, less innovative than standard-issue at this point (although it’s amazing to see the lines for the touch-screen Coca-Cola Freestyle machine, even years after its initial introduction). There are minor variations on the same ideas (seats that sway in multiple different directions!), but the industry has to move forward, to find new ways to entice people to enter its theaters.
This year I saw several attempts to harness the trendy power of virtual reality, but my overall takeaway was that neither studios nor exhibitors understand what to do with VR. At the booth for 4DX, one of the leading purveyors of 4D equipment for theaters, I sat in a 4D movie-theater seat and put on a VR headset to move through a city besieged by dinosaurs, in the VR version of one of those cut-rate motion rides that used to be at the Excalibur. The 4DX representative explained that these non-interactive vignettes (lasting from two to five minutes) are meant to be shown in theater lobbies, make them add-ons like old arcade games, not integrations into the moviegoing experience.
At the Coca-Cola booth, I entered the MX4D Pod, again sitting in a motion seat and donning a headset, this time to watch a Coke commercial. The 4D experience (including the scent of Coke) and the graphics were both better, but I was still watching an ad, and parent company MediaMation is touting the Pod as a tool for advertising, whether for upcoming 4D movies or concessions or even outside businesses. In a hallway outside the main ballroom, I stood inside a mock-up of a shark cage to experience the VR ad for upcoming shark movie 47 Meters Down. I watched as a crude-looking computer graphic of a shark came right at my face, and I was neither scared nor enticed to see the film, which opens in June.
VR may well be the future of something, but at CinemaCon it was still a distraction from the main event. I only made it to one big studio presentation, for Paramount, but it was emblematic of how these things go. There were awkward speeches from studio executives (introduced by a DJ like they were pro athletes hosting at a nightclub) and uncomfortable appearances from celebrities, including Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron (promoting Baywatch), Matt Damon and George Clooney (promoting Suburbicon) and former Vice President Al Gore (promoting the sequel to An Inconvenient Truth). Beneath the forced banter and self-congratulation were some promising movie clips, including from sci-fi thriller Annihilation (starring Natalie Portman and directed by Ex Machina’s Alex Garland) and quirky Alexander Payne sci-fi comedy Downsizing, starring Damon and Kristen Wiig. No VR or motion seats were needed to get me excited about those.
