How chains like Cinemark and AMC are testing high-end, immersive multiplayer VR experiences in select movie theaters
ONCE UPON A time, the company with the biggest screens in the world made a big bet on virtual reality. IMAX opened seven VR centers in movie theaters around the globe … Tweets: @provenself , @wired , and @wired Tweets: Peter Rubin / @provenself : IMAX made a big bet on VR, then reconsidered. Bad for them, good for the movie-theater chains that are doing it the right way: slower roll-out, and way, WAY better VR. My latest. http://wired.com/... @wired : While others are jumping ship on VR, movie theaters are starting to buy in. This ‘Terminator’ experience is exhibit A. To play, users put on a vest, hand and foot trackers, and a headset, and enter a 12-minute adventure with teammates by their side http://www.wired.com/... http://twitter.com/... @wired : While IMAX was closing its virtual reality centers, other big theater chains were tiptoeing into the space, using a different playbook. Better VR, fewer locations, and taking it nice and slow. http://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
IMAX was the cautionary tale here: after opening seven VR centers in theaters worldwide, it shut three — including its New York City flagship — and pledged no VR spending in 2019, as covered in its New York center closure. Peter Rubin's argument is that Cinemark and AMC learned the lesson: fewer sites, slower rollout, and far better hardware.
The template they are following was visible two years earlier in Nomadic's room-based VR hands-on, which used real walls and physical objects instead of open-room walking. The 'Terminator' experience now testing in their theaters — vests, body trackers, 12-minute team missions — is that physical-set model reaching chain scale.
First-order effects
- Cinemark and AMC convert underused theater square footage into ticketed 12-minute multiplayer sessions, adding a per-experience revenue line alongside concessions and box office.
- IMAX's exit leaves the location-based VR slot in multiplexes open, and the two chains are claiming it before a third party does.
Second-order effects
- Studios building physical-set VR content — the Nomadic lineage of rooms, props, and wearable trackers — gain anchor tenants with hundreds of locations, shifting leverage toward whoever owns the venue relationship.
- Rival exhibitors face pressure to match an experience home headsets cannot replicate; the later push to bring movies into home VR, seen in Meta's Quest media hub, sharpens exactly that divide.
Third-order effects
- If the slow-rollout model holds where IMAX's fast one failed, multiplexes structurally reposition from screen-rental venues into mixed out-of-home entertainment hubs — the same direction UK theater companies took broadcasting productions via AR and VR in pandemic-era experiments.
- The split between cheap home headsets and expensive shared-space VR hardens into a two-tier market, with theaters competing on physicality rather than resolution.
The trend: Movie theaters are answering streaming and home-headset competition by renting out physical presence itself, with location-based VR rolling out slowly where IMAX's rapid expansion collapsed.