Aeroplane style seating and interacting with the big screen: Welcome to cinemas of the future

The CEO of Hoyts, Damian Keogh, has opened up to news.com.au about how a regular trip to the cinema will soon be completely different for experience for Aussie moviegoers.

Let’s start with seats shall we? Get ready to choose how much you pay depending on what type of seat you want to sit in.

“I would say that the trends on seating will be more like an airline,” said Mr Keogh.

“There’ll be your standard kind of seating and then there’ll be your business class seating which is like our Lux (more about that later). But also there’s also another potential hybrid version which, by comparison, will be like a premium economy seat.”

Now let’s move onto mobile phones. Nowadays you’re encouraged to switch your phone off as soon as you enter the cinema, but expect that to change.

“What we are looking at with our Val Morgan (cinema advertising) business is the potential for mobile involvement with the big screen before the feature film commences,” said Mr Keogh.

“The kinds of things that we can do there are potentially ad-funded trivia games, competitions, extended trailers and that kind of thing. We’re looking at the technology and we’re still evaluating that but we’ll probably launch something early next year.”

Let’s be honest, some of us tune out when the commercials roll before the movie starts, but perhaps we’ll be paying more attention in the future.

“With Nescafe last year during their ad, we actually had sprays in the seats that sprayed a coffee aroma,” said Mr Keogh.

“So there’s all those kinds of things from an advertising perspective which we can look at doing.”

Hang on just a second, did Mr Keogh just reveal that they have the technology for smell-o-vision but they’re not using it?!?!?

“I don’t know that that’s going to be a mainstream thing,” he said laughing.

Moving on. The first major change for Hoyts will be the introduction of six new Lux cinemas before Christmas this year.

What exactly is a Lux cinema you ask? Great question.

“What we’ve done with Lux (which will replace HOYTS La Premiere and HOYTS Directors Suite) is created a really funky kind of bar area where people can socialise before the movie, have a couple of drinks and something to eat and then go into a luxury cinema with reclining seats,” said Keogh.

“You’ll have call buttons in your seat so that you can call a waiter if you want to order a drink during the movie or some food and after the movie, once again you can come out into an environment where you can hang out in a funky bar with some good music playing and a bunch of people around and you can stay and have a chat about the movie.”

Naturally you’ll have to pay more for this kind of experience, as you will for all movie tickets in the future.

“I think it’ll (ticket prices) probably keep pace with cost of living and general entertainment ticketing,” said Mr Keogh.

And that’s a wrap.