Ordinarily, you’d have to imagine the scent of fresh blueberry pie that lures the sister missionaries of Heretic, a recent psychological horror film, into the off-limits home of a single man. (Sister Mormon missionaries are not allowed to be with a man sans a chaperone; the potential convert, a psychopath played by Hugh Grant, assures them that his wife is in the other room baking dessert.) But at a special screening in Brooklyn last month, blueberry pie smell filled the theater at Grant’s cue, thanks to a themed, one-night-only collaboration with the fragrance company Joya Studio. The scent lingered for a few scenes, waning along with girls’ faith and sense of safety.
The aroma and an extra treat – unlike the poor missionaries, viewers were eventually served real blueberry pie (and gifted a potent pie-scented candle) – added a special layer to the experience of watching a cerebral thriller in a theater. A small, not revolutionary layer – Smell-o-Vision was a hot movie gimmick in the 1950s – but memorable nonetheless. Which is the point: the screening, a joint production by A24, Joya and Alamo Drafthouse theaters nationwide, was a level up from the normal movie-going experience – an extra in-scentive (sorry) to actually go sit in a theater when at-home entertainment options abound. “People have choices on where they’re going to see a film,” said Chaya Rosenthal, chief marketing officer at Alamo Drafthouse. “We need to give them as many reasons to come out and enjoy the film and the full immersive experience in a theater.”
Such is the challenge facing theatrical businesses, after the pandemic pummeled the industry and accelerated the consumer shift away from cinemas. The average American went to the theater about five times in the year 2001; in 2024, US theaters sold about 1.8 tickets a person, as movie-going continues to become less regular habit than occasional treat. This year has been another tough one for the domestic box office, which is down 24% from 2019, and 5.4% below this time last year. But the overall “death of cinema” picture belies some hope. While the overall theatrical business settles into a new, reduced post-pandemic normal, premium cinema – from the biggest screens to small, cinephile-inclined boutique events – is thriving.
I write about movies, so I see them regularly in a whole variety of formats, from my laptop to standard theaters. But this year I, too, was increasingly drawn to something different, special, deluxe. Anything to beat the gravitational pull of at-home convenience. Something bigger and louder for Dune: Part Two, or a way to actually ride the storm in Twisters. Or an extra, bespoke flourish – the scent of blueberry pie, or a Gladiator II-themed cocktail. More of my dollars have gone to Imax, which continued its post-pandemic surge after a record 2023 (thanks largely to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer). Or to 4DX, the borderline amusement park ride format that saw a breakout summer, new box office records and viral TikToks celebrating the vortex that was Twisters.
“What we’ve seen in our data is that especially coming out of the pandemic, there’s two things that can be true at the same time,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Comscore. First, people are more cost conscious. Yet they also “do not mind at all paying a premium to get that premium experience” – say, $5-10 more for Imax than the average $10.78 for a standard ticket, particularly as more blockbuster fare is pitched toward the proprietary, immersive format. Dune: Part Two, which director Denis Villeneuve filmed specifically for Imax, got nearly a quarter of its domestic box office haul from the format. So, too, did Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, an overall box-office miss that over-performed on the extra wide screens with extra teeth-rattling sound systems. And it’s not just new releases – the 10-year re-release of Nolan’s Interstellar this month has sold out Imax theaters nationwide.
The premium large formats – Imax, wraparound ScreenX and 4DX – accounted for over a fifth (20.7%) of the total domestic box office this year to date, up from 19.4% last year and 15.2% pre-pandemic, according to data from Comscore. “It’s just becoming a bigger and bigger part of the business,” said Dergarabedian. “It costs more, but people don’t go to movies every day. They’re making their decisions based on the experiential part of it.”
That experiential piece doesn’t necessarily mean go big or go home. Boutique theater chains and specialty companies have found a lucrative niche on the smaller end of the spectrum, by customizing everything from pre-movie content to food. Some, such as Alamo Drafthouse, have started hosting speed-dating events in their bars (a success, at least for one cinephile friend). “We’re learning all sorts of new ways to event-ize films where it becomes more of an immersive experience,” said Rosenthal, from pop-up experiences to kids parties to dress-up screenings (there will be wigs and Bob Dylan-esque sunglasses for A Complete Unkown). The company plans to expand into slime – movie tie-in TBD – and a cinephile jewelry line, with new charms for each title. “We think of each film as its own campaign, and we think about how we can create the different beats in the campaign,” said Rosenthal. “It’s all about whimsy. We lean into whimsy.”
Fork n’ Film, which crafts gourmet meals customized to the screen, specializes whimsy even further. The cinematic events company, founded in the summer of 2023 by Nicholas Houston and Francesca Duncan after watching Matilda on an empty stomach, was forged in the isolation of the pandemic and burgeoning millennial nostalgia. “How do we bring you back to your childhood, but in a new way?” said Houston. “Because we all went to Blockbuster, we all went to the movies with our families. How can we reignite that?”
What started as a small event at Houston’s apartment went viral on social media, and expanded into regular sensory experiences in New York, San Diego, Las Vegas, London, Chicago, with pop-ups elsewhere. For about $200 a person (price varies by event), an executive chef pairs “iconic movie moments” with culinary ones – ratatouille for Ratatouille, a cocktail based on Hocus Pocus’s potion of life, or edible glass shard in place of the Grinch’s beer bottles, served at a regular beat throughout the film and designed to be photographed. The self-funded company markets purely through social-media; it’s on track for $8m in revenue this year, according to the founders.
The same word is found on either end of the spectrum: event. “Event-izing” cinema, the “event-ization” of movies, a one-time-only movie “event”. Something you could only do, that you could only see (and smell and taste and hear), with people you could only encounter at the cinema. From premium large formats to premium meals, all captured and blasted across social media, the movie theater increasingly “becomes almost a character in the movie, or becomes part of the movie”, said Dergarabedian. The theater as a destination for one big, immersive, sensory or social outing at a time, as cinemas large and small treat going to the movies as the luxury it is becoming.
