Get Beset on All Sides by ‘Kingsman: The Golden Circle’ with Nutso 270-Degree Screen
Movie theaters have been, as of late, doing the most. The unending war to beat back the streaming barbarians at the gate has driven multiplexes into committing to some rather weird gimmicks, from serving food during the show to building a playground directly in the theater to the fully-immersive goofiness of 4DX screenings. The latest ploy to keep cheeks in seats is known as ScreenX, and though its name may suggest a format in which a film plays on ten screens, in actuality it will play on a mere three. That’s still a lot, though, at least when compared to the standard allotment of one.
This week, Deadline brings the news that the upcoming Kingsman sequel will play on the multi-screen wraparound experience, delighting fans who wish they spent more time looking to the left and right during films. While the logic of placing a large portion of the cinematic image in the audience’s peripheral vision may be lost on me, that’s how Kingsman: The Golden Circle will be shown in a whopping three auditoriums across America. If you live in the New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas metropolitan areas and want to be beset on all sides by wisecracking secret agents with a hedonistic side, then you’re in luck.
This method of exhibition has yet to be proven as viable in the U.S., as the only movies to have attempted such a gambit before are Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and the Korean picture Battleship Island. And of course, the most critical question of all: how much with this boondoggle cost? It’d be a lot to ask audiences to shell out $22, just for what will almost surely end up the 21st-century version of Smell-O-Vision.