Five Ways We’ll Watch Movies in the Future and ‘The Idea of You’

Five ways we’ll watch moviesfour formats, four test films

The Fall Guy 2024

The 4DX test. Hydraulic four-seat rigs that lift, shake, and tumble with every stunt, plus wind, strobes, and a water on/off button on the armrest. Sean calls it worse than a car with no suspension on an unpaved road, dangerous for a man in his 40s with bad posture. Amanda bailed to the floor five minutes in and watched him get jerked around instead. Sean's verdict: half-baked and a little desperate, the theaters admitting the movies aren't enough. Both later rewatched it in a normal seat and had a fine time; it opened to $28.5 million against a $35 million projection.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire 2024

The ScreenX test. The main screen plus two more slapped on the side walls for a 270-degree image, developed by CJ CGV (also behind 4DX). Roughly 70 percent of the movie plays on the center screen only and cuts to the wide format at random; the side panels look lower-quality, mounted flat with no depth. Underwhelming to both, though the pyramids in full panorama paid off. Colloquially 'sideways IMAX,' which Sean thinks does IMAX a disservice.

Challengers 2024

The IMAX test, at the Burbank 16, with Sean's wife Eileen along. The clear winner: the Justin Kuritzkes-scripted, Guadagnino tennis movie rips, the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score is deafening, and the close-ups (pores, sweat drops the size of your head) suit the format as well as any action epic. Sean argues a movie this visually specific earns IMAX more than a Fall Guy does; someone on Twitter wanted the Fall Guy screens taken away and Challengers put back.

Barbie 2023

The Apple Vision Pro test. Amanda borrowed Van Lathan's headset and watched about 20 minutes, through Weird Barbie's house and the Dua Lipa dance sequence, frozen stiff for fear that moving would turn it off. Impressive but heavy and intimidating; a $3,500 first-generation device. Sean had done an Apple-hosted demo months earlier and was sold on the airplane use case, plus theater mode and an immersive dinosaur experience, while worrying it turns everyone into the pod people from WALL-E.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie 2023

What Apple queued up for Sean's Vision Pro theater-mode demo, projected as if on a big screen in a virtual auditorium. A movie he doesn't much like, but the effect was cool enough that he was taken away by ten minutes of it.

‘The Idea of You’the fifth way: straight to streaming

The Idea of You 2024

The couch test: a Michael Showalter rom-com from Robinne Lee's novel that Amazon dropped straight to Prime Video, the kind of star vehicle that at any point in the last 70 years would have gone to theaters. Anne Hathaway is Solène, a 40-year-old gallery owner and single mom who falls into a whirlwind with 24-year-old Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), lead of the boy band August Moon, after a Coachella meet-and-greet. Both had a better time than expected. Amanda calls it one of the best streaming-movie experiences in a while, more Rami than commie, resting almost entirely on Hathaway. The knock: she's too radiant to sell the character's fragility, and the age-gap stakes wobble when everyone looks the same age. Sean flags the film's changed ending (in the book they stay broken up; the movie reunites them). A running joke on watching-at-home habits: pausing, phone-checking during the boy-band numbers, texting friends who'd already seen it.

Also mentioned raised along the way

Original-ish hits, as box-office comps The Lost CityBullet TrainAnyone but YouElemental

The summer ahead Furiosa: A Mad Max SagaThe Garfield MovieKingdom of the Planet of the ApesIF

Format touchstones Avatar: The Way of WaterTop Gun: MaverickDune: Part TwoOppenheimer2001: A Space OdysseyInterstellarMarriage Story

Showalter, Hathaway, and the streaming lane The Big SickThe Eyes of Tammy FayeLes MisérablesThe Princess DiariesThe Devil Wears PradaThe Gray ManDrive-Away Dolls

In passing HeatThere Will Be BloodLast Action HeroBack to the FutureVirtuosityDisclosureBlade Runner 2049I Saw the TV Glow

Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads

TV The Graham Norton ShowThe Roast of Tom BradyBeverly Hills, 90210

Podcasts / web The RewatchablesThe WatchHigher LearningRinger Movies (YouTube)The 1999 Movie Draft

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