4DX, the Premium Format Quietly Winning the Multiplex

At 13:19 UTC on 18 July 2026, Variety published fourteen minutes of 4DX presentation footage from 'The End of Oak Street,' the new dinosaur feature starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor. The clip exists because someone inside the distribution chain decided the most persuasive argument for the film is not the trailer, the poster, or the critic quote, but the seat itself: moving, spraying, rumbling, and timed to a T. rex that, in the preview, attempts to eat Hathaway's character alive while the chair bucks beneath the viewer.

The point of the exercise is commercial, not cinematic. Premium large formats have spent a decade converting square-footage arguments into per-ticket revenue arguments, and 4DX, the motion-and-effects format owned by South Korea's CJ 4DPlex, is the most aggressive of the lot. A 14-minute preview dropping into Variety is not fan service; it is a sales document aimed at exhibitors who must decide, in the next few weeks, how many auditoriums to allocate for the film's opening frame.

What 4DX actually sells

Standard premium formats compete on resolution and size: IMAX, Dolby Cinema, premium 3D. 4DX sells kinaesthesia. The seats are mechanised; the auditorium delivers wind, water, scent, fog, and strobe in synchronisation with the image. For a film in which the antagonists are prehistoric predators, the value proposition is intuitive. A T. rex attack becomes a chair-induced near-fall. A chase through forest canopy becomes a swaying room.

The format is not new, but its market share inside North American multiplexes has been creeping up since the early 2020s. Industry coverage of premium formats in recent years has consistently noted that exhibitors recover higher per-head revenue on PLF auditoriums even when overall attendance softens. A seat that shakes is a seat that costs more than a flat one, and the consumer who buys the ticket has self-selected against price sensitivity.

Why distributors keep pushing it

For a studio releasing a film with broad four-quadrant appeal but a familiar premise, the differentiation problem is the entire marketing challenge. 'The End of Oak Street' has two A-list stars, a creature-feature hook, and a title that telegraphs the genre. None of that is unique in July. A 4DX release window offers a way to charge a premium for an experience the home theatre cannot replicate, which is the only durable advantage the theatrical window still has.

Variety's preview footage does not pretend to be a review. It is a demonstration. The publication's article positions the clip as a piece of marketing aimed at the trade as much as at consumers, and the structure of the release (footage posted online before the film's wide opening) tracks with how premium-format deals have been rolled out over the last several cycles: get the format itself into the discourse, then let exhibitors sell the upgrade.

The counter-reading

The reading worth holding against the optimistic one is that premium formats are a hedge against a shrinking core audience, not a growth engine. Every PLF screen added is a screen that has to be amortised against a smaller total pie. If 'The End of Oak Street' opens strong on 4DX, the signal is that a slice of the audience will pay up for the experience; if it opens soft, the format's advocates will attribute the result to screen count, not to consumer fatigue.

There is also a structural scepticism worth noting: the seats themselves are expensive to maintain, and the auditoriums require rebuilds that not every chain can fund. The format's growth has been concentrated in chains with capital access and in markets where multiplex expansion was already active. For independent and second-tier exhibitors, the 4DX pitch is closer to a threat than an opportunity, because it raises the consumer's expectation of what a night out should feel like.

The structural pattern

What is happening on screens like 4DX is a smaller version of what is happening across consumer-facing entertainment: the commodity is no longer the product, it is the delivery. The film is the same film in any auditorium. The seat is the differentiator. This is the same logic that has carried streaming services into live sports, live events, and ad tiers. Whoever controls the most memorable moment of delivery collects the margin.

For exhibitors, the next several weeks are the operational test. The 4DX screen count that 'The End of Oak Street' secures at booking will be the clearest read on whether the format's growth has plateaued or is still on an upward curve. The Variety preview is, in effect, a starting gun.

Stakes, and what remains to be seen

The sources covering this rollout do not specify how many 4DX screens have been committed for the film's opening or what the surcharge per ticket will run in North America. Those numbers will surface in trade reporting in the days before release and will be the more honest measure of how the format is performing. The footage is the invitation; the seat count is the result.

One thing the preview does establish: the marketing of theatrical film in 2026 is no longer primarily about convincing people to leave the house. It is about convincing them that the version of the film they cannot see at home is the version worth seeing. Whether that pitch still works at scale is the open question 'The End of Oak Street' will answer, one chair at a time.

This piece framed the 4DX rollout as a delivery-margin story rather than a film-review story; the news is the format, not the dinosaurs.