The summer of 2025 heralds the birth of a new kind of immersive event, and it’s one that offers us unprecedented opportunities to step inside our favourite films.
Last month, The Matrix premiered at COSM in Los Angeles in an entirely new format. COSM is a kind of big screen venue broadly categorised as ‘fulldome’, with a curved screen that wraps around the audience and over their heads like a planetarium.
The Matrix at COSM in Los Angeles
In the centre of this huge screen was sitting the original rectangular version of The Matrix, inside a digital frame. The rest of the screen was a backdrop which responded to the content of the film in real time – becoming an office cubicle, a subway station, a cityscape, and even the Nebuchadnezzar ship itself.
These virtual environments were animated in sync with the action on screen and, when coupled with COSM’s 12k resolution LED screen, gave us the feeling of being inside the world of the film as we watched it.
Using the film in its original format and building a virtual environment around it is one way to present existing titles in a dome screen. It’s a method honed in the UK by Cardiff-based 4Pi Productions, whose fulldome documentary Arka Kinari embeds rectangular video footage and photos into immersive virtual scenes to tell a story of life at sea. They’ve also developed this technique for live shows, allowing DJ Yoda to mix music video clips from YouTube into fulldome environments.
Arka Kinari live performace at Fulldome UK Festival. Photo by 4Pi Productions
Yet it’s not the only way to take traditional film into fulldome. Next month another beloved title will be transformed for the even bigger screen of Sphere in Las Vegas, but in a very different way. Expect the Wizard of Oz as we know and love it, but upscaled and outpainted by AI for the mammoth 16k dome screen.
Rather than simply embedding the frame into the dome, Sphere has chosen to expand it to fill the whole thing, creating the effect that the film has been shot with 360 degree cameras to include parts of a set that never existed. Google Cloud and DeepMind developed new generative AI methods to expand the original 1939 frames beyond their borders and ‘performance generation’ for digitally populating scenes using fine-tuned models like Gemini, Veo 2, and Imagen 3 to upscale resolution and recreate characters.
Revisiting beloved film titles as immersive adventures of one kind or another isn’t a new concept. Secret Cinema are of course legendary in the field, building entire physical worlds for audiences to explore including Hill Valley from Back To The Future, The Upside Down from Stranger Things, or a lavish casino from Casino Royale. These events are complete with actors, costumes and themed missions, all followed by the screening of the film itself.
Mainly taking place in London, their screenings are large scale productions presenting films with mass appeal and selling hundreds of thousands of tickets. Secret Cinema’s next experience will be Grease, kicking off in BattersePark in August 2025 for a 6-week run.
Make A Scene film club does Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion
In my own experience working with Live Cinema UK we were able to map the immersive film events landscape over the last few years and support some more niche but no less innovative activity on a smaller budget. For example, Make A Scene Film Club screens camp cult classics like Showgirls, Muriel’s Wedding and Death Becomes Her, adding live commentary and breaking the screening up with fancy dress competitions, photo opportunities and live drag performances. Their events are usually one night only, and have a loyal fanbase who follow them around various venues in Manchester.
One of the first immersive film happenings I worked on was with Pilot Light TV Festival, who were celebrating the 20th anniversary of Alan Partridge with a screening party and extra activities such as ‘feeding beefburgers to swans’ and ‘pin the foot on the spike’. We also worked with Celluloid Screams Festival on an airing of Ghostwatch on its 30th anniversary, and staged a full takeover of the AV equipment by Pipes the ghost.
Up and down the country, independent cinemas, film festivals and promoters have presented some form of immersive film screening for one of the regular BFI seasons, including live soundtracks, lectures, flash mobs and tea dances.
What is new to this area though – and the real game-changer – is this expanded screen format and how we can use it. It brings together traditional film and new fulldome screen venues to put cinema audiences inside the world of stories they already know and love.
There is now the potential to create layers of immersion which mix digital and physical elements, and there are already glimpses of what that could look like.
Red and blue cocktail options at The Matrix premiere at COSM
The Matrix screenings at COSM are in partnership with US-based events company Little Cinema, whose story began with joyful film-themed parties at Brooklyn’s House of Yes. Mixing live performance, projection, audience participation and tiny budget, they created more than 40 shows built around a different film each week. A personal favourite example of their immersive activity was an actor dressed as a rug, overlooking the audience and tasked with tying the room together during their screening of The Big Lebowski.
Little Cinema adapted to the pandemic’s restrictions on live events by becoming a pioneer in live online film premieres and virtual events, maintaining their immersive ethos by blending livestreams, chat and gamification. The addition of new digital strings to their bow paved the way for their partnership with COSM and creation of the ultimate immersive film event.
While Little Cinema were key in the creation of the on-screen augmentation, The Matrix premiere also included playful touches from their theatrical handbook, with identically-dressed special agents lining the green carpet, a choice of red or blue cocktails, and an eat-along menu with food mentioned in the film delivered to our seats at the appropriate time.
With COSM indicating that they intend to develop immersive versions of other existing titles – and looking for potential sites in London right now – this new form of immersive film event could reach the UK before we can say “there’s no place like home”.
