At a late-night New York screening of "Twisters," I watch a group of college students chase a Category 5 tornado that is ravaging rural Oklahoma. As the tornado picks up speed, the crew abandons their car, hoping to find shelter under an overpass. Three of them are caught in the wind and sucked into the tornado, dying horribly. It's a horrifying scene, but when it's over, the entire theater erupts in laughter.
4DX Cinemas Next Generation – Moving seats, wind, fog, lighting, bubbles, water and scents
That’s because we, too, were victims of a tornado. Granted, it was a manufactured tornado, undetectable on the EF scale, and experienced from a soft seat in an air-conditioned auditorium. Nevertheless, we were tossed around, carried by the wind, even doused with water. Just as we were recovering, our seats began to move again, resembling truck tires on a dirt road.
That’s the power of 4DX, baby. I paid $32 to see “Twisters” this way when I — an AMC loyalist — could have seen it for free through my A-List membership. That’s because the only 4DX theaters in New York City are inside Regal theaters, and because a friend texted me and literally said, “You have to see ‘Twisters’ in 4DX, the way God intended.” My friend was right: “Twisters,” what I would call a B-movie, became an A+ experience in 4DX.
I wasn’t the only one convinced. Thanks to a calculated marketing campaign, word of mouth, and a viral TikTok trend in which moviegoers showed off exaggerated battle scars in theaters, “Twisters” became 4DX’s biggest domestic opening weekend of the year, taking in $2.3 million. That was until that record was broken a week later by “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which took over all but two of 64 4DX screens nationwide. With those two titles, 4DX scored two of its biggest films ever, back-to-back.
