This article will also appear in the September 2015 edition of Cinema Technology Magazine. My thanks to Jim Slater for his editorial help with this article.
Peter J. Knight spoke with Chris Ratner, CEO of reelXperience
At a time when US box-office attendances are in decline, moviegoers need something thrilling and novel to get them off the couch and out of the house. Chris Ratner explains how reelXperience Entertainment plans a completely new concept in feature film exhibition that truly brings movies to life in a spectacular interactive movie experience. With more than a year of development already completed, and additional investment and partnership opportunities available for a planned launch in 2017, reelXperience Entertainment integrates aspects of feature films into live interactive performances and sets inspired by the motion pictures. The result is claimed to be the ultimate immersion experience, bringing the magic of movies traditional and new to life with an authentic experience to bring people back to the movies.
“The idea of reelXperience is a simple one. It’s a place for people young and old to experience the magic and grandeur of cinematic experiences of yesterday, today and tomorrow” (reelXperience website)
Back in April there was a bit of a buzz around a press release from reelXperience at CinemaCon. The company was promising to provide a new type of cinema going experience, one that was interactive rather than just immersive, and which promised that it was going to ‘save cinema’. Having looked at the website and what they wanted to achieve, I was both intrigued, and I also admit excited, about the idea, of making the cinema going experience exciting again. As people who know me are aware, I am always coming up with different ideas and thoughts around the cinema experience. It was therefore a real pleasure that I got to interview Chris Ratner, the CEO of reelXperience, via Skype, when I was able to really get to ask him all about what it was that he wanted to do, how he was going to do it, and from my point of view, to be able to say that I thought it was amazing. Chris comes with an interest in consumer entertainment with his roots as a technologist and has spent the last few years really researching the current sector. He has spent the last 18 months working full time on developing the project.
What is it all about?
So let’s start with the basics for anyone who has not yet heard about reelXperience.
reelXperience are planning on building their own stand-alone cinema theatre complexes which will have a large cinema theatre along with smaller screens called micro cinemas.
The large spaces, while black boxes, are black boxes in the sense that they are actually theatres (sorry I can’t bear to spell it the American way). They are going to offer a full interactive movie going experience which can last between 2 – 6 hours. The approximate cost would be around $60 a ticket. These screenings are events, where it is has deliberately been intended that people might only go three or four times a year – in much the same way that you would go a theme park. And there are elements of theme parks in here, but all the positive bits, and not the gimmicky film experience at theme parks which we all know.
The second part, the micro-cinemas are small auditoriums which would allow lots of flexible screenings, which might not just be film but other content as well, including live events. They would be used both for first run movies and showing classic films as well. Event cinema as we know it in the UK hasn’t quite arrived in the US to the degree it has here. The idea with these is that they are cost effective cinemas which people can hire for their own private events and select the content that they may want to watch. These are the spaces which are aimed at bringing in the repeat audiences each week, rather than just once a quarter.
What is it all about?
And some of this has come about because Chris is a really big film fan. He goes to the cinema once a week and likes watching both the films and the interactions of the audience. He explained that he saw that audiences were dropping and that cinema is no longer something special, that the youth are losing their interest in going to the cinema. Chris gives an example of when Jurassic Park was released a few years ago in 3D. He wanted to take his children to watch. At first they were not interested, because they had seen it many times before, but when they did see it on the big screen and in 3D they were converted to wanting to watch films in that way. And this is what reelXperience is about – it aims to bring back that excitement and the special experience of going to the cinema and seeing something on the big screen. This is about there being a variety of different elements to the overall ‘package’ which people can opt into – maybe just the interactive experience over dinner and a film, or the whole movie premiere experience.
Completely new
As I mentioned earlier, the cinemas are going to be built from scratch, as there is nothing currently available that suits their needs, so they will be designed from the ground up and reelXperience are pushing their integrators to help to achieve it all. There is still a lot of imagining which needs to be done, but the centre piece of the complexes are going to be grand lobbies, which are going to be big spaces from which the customers will disperse off into smaller areas, such as the bar, restaurant, games area, or the different cinema spaces.
The competition?
Having read a number of the press releases and initial articles, I wondered whether Chris was aware of the UK’s Secret Cinema events and whether they were going to be the same. The answer was that he was aware and had attended some, but they were definitely not the same and they were targeting a different market. reelXperience is more exclusive and for a different, wider, age group. Chris wants reelXperience to be the thing that brings people back to cinema, and has no problem in including some theme parkish elements. In fact later on in the interview Chris says that he sees reelXperience as complimenting both Secret Cinema and the more traditional multiplex.
Premium pricing for a top experience
So I asked about the ticket price – if this was about getting people to come out to the cinema again then wasn’t one of the reasons that people stayed away the price of the ticket? Yet the plan is to charge $60. The answer of course is that there is a sliding scale of high quality v high price. This is about having a good experience, but maybe not every week.
The whole ethos of what Chris is trying to achieve is that the customer just gets an amazing experience and the best possible service. In fact I would even suggest that Chris wishes to provide something which is even better than the best. This is about helping to engage with the ‘sharing’ generation – who want to have an experience and share it with people who have GoPros (cameras to capture and share your life experiences) and who are used to interacting all the time.
Negotiations are currently going on with content providers (i.e. Movie Studios/Distributors) but it is hoped that a mixture of old classics along with new films will be shown.
Understanding the possibilities
At the moment reelXperience has the task of getting people to understand what it is that Chris and his team are trying to achieve. Once people are in that head space then they are able to start to see all the possibilities which would then be open to them – and in the case of content creators, generating another revenue stream and way of creating excitement about their brand or franchises. A practical example Chris gave was Universal’s Jurassic World where the site is all setup as though it was a real theme park.
Technology matters
We talked about technology and whilst it was acknowledged that digital was going to make life easier, we did have a brief discussion about 35mm – Chris loves 35mm as well, and nothing is ruled out of these productions. And we did also talk about projectionists and their role within all of this. The answer was that the whole experience was going to be staff intensive, but that technology would also help with keeping some of the costs down along with automation. However, there was an acknowledgement that each production would need evaluating as to what the staffing requirements were likely to be and whether a technical person was going to be required or not, or whether the technical person would also need to be responsible for other areas as well.
Roll-out plans
Having listened to Chris’s enthusiasm for this project for a while and hearing what he wanted to achieve, I jokingly asked when he was opening his UK version. The reality is that there is a roadmap which ideally includes international experience, but that is a number of years away yet, and there is a lot of work to be done beforehand. Chris talks about people like Walt Disney and what they achieved as being inspirations for him on the project – he really wants to take cinema away from the norm.
Partnership – working together
Since the buzz that happened around the announcement at CinemaCon there has been a lot of traction and people are starting to see the opportunities, along with companies and manufacturers who are interested in the project. It is obvious that this is going to be one of those ‘team projects’ where all the companies and people involved are going to have truly work together and share the same passion in order for it to be achieved, but I also think that will happen as well.
Interactivity
I noticed that throughout their website they used the word interactive rather than immersive and wondered why. The reason is that Chris thinks immersive is now over-used, everything is immersive and it no longer stands out when you are talking about it. But also this is meant to be a much more interactive experience. You are meant to interact with the people and things around you and they are meant to interact with you. There are meant to be surprises, and being delighted in what we experience. Chris had enjoyed Tomorrowland, and described how at the end of the film, he wanted to really go off and find his own pin to be allowed into Tomorrowland himself, or to experience what it was like to be in Oz and follow the yellow brick road.
Avoiding the gimmicks
But how do you make this a sustainable experience, and not let it go the way of smell-o-vision, or 3D or any of the other experiments which have been tried in cinemas over the years in order to try and get the audiences to leave their sofas? When there is so much content on demand in so many different formats, what is that will make audiences want to come multiple times a year? Chris acknowledged that 3D and smell-o-vision etc. is all a gimmick. But reelXperience is concerned with the value is that is trying to be achieved, about doing something which involves live entertainment and interactivity, and bringing the two together. There is something special about live entertainment which you cannot reproduce in the home or on the mobile phone screen. And above all he wants to make that magic accessible to all, so that you don’t have to go to a theme park, but can get it as part of going to the cinema. To quote from the reelXperiece website again: “It will be filled with the treasures and imagination that could only be created in Hollywood. It will make our hearts race, our pulses quicken and our spines tingle It will usher in a new era of social experiential entertainment that is limited only by our imagination.”
Technology is going to be a big part of reelXperiece, but unfortunately it was too early to be able to talk about the specifics of the whats and hows – that will have to wait for a future article.
The business plan
With plans to open in the US in 2017 there are still a number of questions which are still being worked on and which are either currently unknown, being worked, evolving or just too commercially sensitive to be able to talk about, so there may be points at which this article are a bit vague, but in the future I hope to be able to fill in some more of those blanks when I am able to catch up with Chris to understand the next chapter of the story.
As I’m currently looking for a new job and I love the idea of reelXperience and everything which Chris is trying to achieve, I did ask if he had any jobs. The reality is that they are beginning to spin up, so you never know……
I know that there will be many out there who are likely to be cynical about all of this and who will feel that maybe this will be a distraction from the film. But this is about trying to make cinema exciting again, a reason to be there, and if reelXperience can help to achieve that then it has to be a good thing. reelXperience is about complimenting multiplexes and other ‘interactive or immersive’ experiences such as Secret Cinema.
And one final quote from the website which I hope sums up what they reelXperience is trying to achieve and is all about, and why I am excited by it: “reelXperience is based upon and dedicated to the ideals of amazing cinematic experiences, preserving the cinema of the past while moving forward to the cinema of the future. It will be a spectacle, an exhibition, a theatre, a playground, a community centre and a museum.”
It was a real pleasure to be able to talk to Chris and I want to thank him for being generous with his time and for answering my questions.