Have you noticed that buying a multiplex ticket can feel like taking an AP exam? Seeing Avatar 3 last year made me choose between HFR, AVX, ScreenX and D-BOX, when the only thing I really wanted to know was if the Coke Freestyle machine was working. It’s all in pursuit of adding premium costs to the movie experience to buffer the ballooning budget of blockbuster movies. Ahead of Avengers: Doomsday, Disney has unveiled “Infinity Vision,” a new theater-going experience that will be certain to transform your pedestrian $15 night out into an exotic $43 one.
“Disney’s standards for production quality are second to none,” says Disney distribution head Andrew Cripps in a press release, “every single detail of a film finely tuned for an immersive experience… Infinity Vision certification extends that commitment to the theaters themselves, representing a shared effort between The Walt Disney Studios and the exhibition community to help audiences quickly find the very best screens in their area to experience our films in exactly the way they’re designed to be seen – on a huge screen with the sharpest, clearest color and sound.”
Light on specifics, Disney says they will be certifying premium large format theaters for the Infinity Vision experience, highlighting laser projection and immersive audio quality. The new program will begin in the summer for a theater run of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame ahead of Doomsday’s holiday release.
Now you might be thinking: Giant screen? Booming audio? That sounds an awful lot like IMAX. The most consumer-recognized premium movie-going screen is the coveted throne for big blockbuster events, from Avatar to One Battle After Another. Unfortunately for Doomsday, IMAX screens are already booked for the holiday season by Dune: Part Three, the anticipated return to Arrakis where Timothée Chalamet’s Muad’Dib will begin to go worm-mode. Locked out of the popular choice for doubling your ticket price, Disney appears to have made up a new one.
The announcement was made at this year’s CinemaCon, a trade show between major Hollywood studios and theater chains. In recent years it has become something of a mini-comicon as the major releases are increasingly monopolized by superhero and genre fare. Disney says they aim to certify 75 theaters in the United States and 300 internationally for the Infinity Vision program.