Can 2026 Live Up to 2025’s Immersive Experience at Cinema?

The cinemas in 2025 have entered a new wave of experimentation with their promotional events through the magic of the immersive experience. Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025) featured barbers ready to shave members of the bald community in order to attend the screening at Culver Theatre (Los Angeles). The Long Walk (Francis Lawrence, 2025) filled its theatres with treadmills, offering the audience a taste of the characters’ situation by walking at a speed faster than three miles per hour for the entire film. The Minecraft Movie (Jared Hess, 2025) sparked the problematic TikTok “chicken jockey” trend, where cinemagoers caused chaos by throwing food and drinks across theatres worldwide.

The Birth of Immersive Experiences at Cinema

These immersive strategies are not the first experiments in cinema. Looking back to the pioneering Lumière brothers in 1896, one of the first screenings of their 50-second short left the audience so overwhelmed by the moving image of a life-sized train coming directly toward them that people supposedly screamed and ran to the back of the room in panic. Each era has witnessed technological advancements shaping how viewers perceive a movie, from sound effects and improved visuals to 3D and 4DX technologies that stimulate all five senses, and now to virtual and interactive platforms and devices. Some claim these innovations borrow from theatre’s ancestral rituals, where boundaries between performance and reality blur, integrating the audience into the story itself. Experiences can go beyond high-tech, even gastronomic, replacing traditional popcorn and soda with whatever the on-screen character is consuming.

Why Immersive Experience Is Good for Audiences

Immersive experiences change how viewers interact with a film. Audiences actively participate rather than passively observe, engaging both their bodies and emotions.  Studies suggest that watching films allows viewers to inhabit characters’ lives, fostering empathy. Films provide a safe, fictional space to process emotions, explore motivations, or find distraction from daily stress. They can prompt introspection and reflection on one’s own values and circumstances. Individual responses vary based on personality, past experiences, and the content viewed. Immersive techniques can also enhance memory by engaging multiple senses and emotions, creating rich memory contexts. Yet will audiences remember the film itself, or only the surrounding experience?

The Hidden Risks of The Immersive Experience

On the other hand, films can create unrealistic expectations or amplify negative feelings. Distorted, sensationalised, graphic, or violent content can be triggering for individuals with PTSD, anxiety, or phobias. Certain genres can even trigger physiological reactions, as famously demonstrated by Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975).

Immersive experiences can also be costly and raise accessibility concerns for both cinema staff and audiences. High costs, limited locations, and physical demands often exclude many, raising questions of equity: are these innovations truly for the viewer, or primarily for a marketable niche? Who can participate fully, and who is left on the sidelines due to economic reasons or restricted by disability or health? Is the cost-benefit really worthy?

Inclusivity is a right, not a privilege. Everyone should have equal access, regardless of limitations, rather than it being an extra that must be purchased or negotiated. True inclusion must extend to the cinematic experience itself in terms of prices, ensuring that audiences of all abilities, backgrounds, and circumstances can participate fully, not as a token gesture on screen, but as a standard practice in real life.

Phones, Screens, and the Cinema Experience Clash

Today, no-phone policies clash with a phone-addicted society. Participants buy tickets and shape potential new audiences, but what price does the cinematic experience pay? Screen sizes continue to grow to maximise user experience, yet the distance between earpiece and microphone widens, and phones lose their original purpose: to communicate, verbally or face-to-face. In communal spaces like cinemas, even large screens can feel inconvenient for others. Meanwhile, the internet, largely unregulated, offers endless content but little grounding. Although films are fundamentally communal, connect fandoms and build communities, algorithms increasingly mediate and dictate the connections they spark.

Even with immersive screenings, audience attention is fragile. In an age of constant notifications and endless feeds, viewers are prone to boredom if the experience does not immediately captivate them, prompting them to check their phones compulsively. This addiction to digital distraction competes with the communal and immersive potential of cinema, fragmenting attention and reducing engagement. Filmmakers and theatres now face the dual challenge of creating experiences that are both captivating enough to hold attention and respectful of the collective viewing environment. In a response to the second screening phenomenon, screenwriters have been simplifying their plots.

Challenges Facing the Modern Cinema Industry

Looking at the bigger picture, the cinema industry faces structural pressures: two multiplexes within 20 miles of each other closed this year in the UK, alongside the gentrification and closure of the historic Electric Cinema. The domino effect began with the pandemic: chains closed, audiences disappeared, releases stalled, and costs rose. Recovery from the pandemic and Hollywood strikes in 2023 has been slow. It is understandable that these immersive experiences are not cheap, as they require creativity and a substantial budget to rent or purchase props, equipment, and specialized services. They demand time-consuming, careful planning, technical expertise, and innovative thinking to deliver a truly engaging audience experience.

Culver Theatre and the Quest for Immersive Experiences

These 2025 immersive events might be attempts to swim against the tide, following Culver Theatre’s clever approach to create a unique movie-watching environment. Today, second-screen viewing is common, influencing even screenwriters who simplify plots knowing audiences are distracted by phones. Another battle lies in copyright disputes with content creators and influencers, who film inside theatres to promote their experiences online through lazy marketing, disrupting the experiences of the potential audiences (their followers) while disturbing the spectators present.

Cinema as a Communal Space: Past, Present, and Future

Historically, cinema began as a communal space. In the 19th century, urban working-class people and recent immigrants frequented nickelodeons and vaudeville theatres. They screened silent films with universal visual storytelling, regardless of barriers. Unescorted young women and children were often welcomed, while wealthier audiences initially dismissed cinema as cheap or lowbrow. Over time, as exhibition venues grew, cinema’s appeal broadened to attract a mass audience across social classes. Music often accompanied silent screenings, performed live and adapting to on-screen action and audience mood, a ritual now largely absent, perhaps because the nature of film has changed, otherwise a conflict of hearing.

Today, streaming dominates the world, and loneliness is rising. Cinema’s role as a communal space, with engaged audiences and shared experiences, feels increasingly urgent. Can cinema still surprise, challenge, or create community in a world ruled by screens, curated content, and the audiences it cultivates? Or has convenience replaced ritual, and the immersive, shared experience become a relic of the past? Perhaps the future of cinema will depend not only on technology and the concerning rise of artificial intelligence, but on our willingness to reclaim it as a shared, communal, and unpredictable experience. One that screens alone cannot replace.