‘The Matrix is everywhere’: cinema bets on immersion

In a Los Angeles theater, a trench coat-wearing Neo bends backwards to dodge bullets that spiral over the viewer’s head, because the sound of gunfire erupts from all over the place.

This new immersive expertise is designed to be a purple tablet second that may get movie followers off their couches at a time when the film business is determined to deliver again audiences.

Cosm, which has venues in Los Angeles and Dallas, is launching its dome-style display and 3D units in June with a “shared actuality” model of “The Matrix,” the cult 1999 movie starring Keanu Reeves as a person who immediately learns his world is a fiction.

“We consider the long run can be extra immersive and extra experiential,” stated Cosm president Jeb Terry at a latest preview screening.

“It is making an attempt to create an additive, a brand new expertise, ideally non-cannibalistic, in order that the business can proceed to thrive throughout all codecs.”

Cinema audiences had been already dwindling when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, shuttering theaters at a time when streaming was exploding.

With ever greater and higher TVs obtainable for the house, the problem for theater house owners is to supply one thing that film buffs can’t get of their front room.

Status tasks like Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Unimaginable—The Closing Reckoning” or Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning “Oppenheimer” more and more go for the massive screens and superior movie high quality of IMAX.

However Cosm and different tasks prefer it wish to go one step additional, collaborating with designers who’ve labored with Cirque du Soleil to create an setting during which the viewer appears like they’re contained in the movie.

For filmmakers, it is all about the way you place the cameras and the place you seize the sound, stated Jay Rinsky, founding father of Little Cinema, a inventive studio specializing in immersive experiences.

“We create units just like the Parisian opera, let the film be the singer, comply with the tone, spotlight the feelings… by means of gentle, by means of manufacturing design, by means of 3D environments,” he stated.

The strategy, he stated, felt significantly properly suited to “The Matrix,” which he referred to as “a masterpiece of cinema, however carried out as a rectangle.”

For the uninitiated: Reeves’s Neo is a pc hacker who begins poking round in a life that does not fairly appear to suit.

A mysterious Laurence Fishburne gives him a blue tablet that may depart him the place he’s, or a purple tablet that may present him he’s a slave whose physique is being farmed by AI machines whereas his acutely aware lives in a pc simulation.

There follows a lot gunfire, a lot of martial arts and a few mysticism, together with a romance between Neo and Trinity, performed by the leather-clad Carrie-Anne Moss.

“The Matrix” in shared actuality kicks off with a selection of cocktails—blue or purple, in fact—that are consumed because the viewers sits surrounded by high-definition screens.

Shifting views place the viewer inside Neo’s workplace cubicle, or seemingly in peril.

“They’re typically contained in the character’s head,” stated Rinsky. “The world modifications as you search for and down for vans coming at you.”

The outcome impressed those that had been on the preview screening.

“It simply did really feel like an expertise,” influencer Vince Rossi advised AFP. “It felt such as you’re at a theme park for a film nearly.”

© 2025 AFP