The pitch sounds like a bit that got out of hand: take Wicker, the Sundance folk-horror oddity in which Olivia Colman's medieval fisherwoman acquires a wicker-man husband played by Alexander Skarsgård, and run it through 4DX — the theme-park-ride cinema format built for car chases and CGI battles. There are no cars in Wicker. There are no battles. There is, however, a bed-breaking consummation scene, and someone at Black Bear Distribution had the commercial instinct to bet everything on it. The resulting event screenings — 60 one-night-only dates that sold out fast enough to be extended to a full week — represent something the format has genuinely not done before. Since 4DX arrived in the US in 2014, it has been the loyal servant of action cinema. The format's moving chairs, scent machines, wind sprayers, and water jets map almost automatically onto Fast and Furious chase sequences or Avatar battle scenes. The writer's previous benchmark for 4DX excellence was Twisters in summer 2024, where simulated wind and rain during a tornado movie hit a kind of platonic ideal of the format's purpose. Wicker resets that benchmark by doing something structurally different: it makes the format funny. The programming decisions alone deserve serious credit. Someone had to choreograph the jackhammer taps for the village normies' unsatisfying sex scenes — a trot, as the piece correctly notes, versus the main couple's gallop. That contrast is actual comic craft, not a gimmick. The chamberpot splash, the gentle river-float bump, the knock in the back when a door closes — these are programmers finding texture in a film that offers none of the obvious 4DX handholds, and mostly succeeding. The scent team's decision to spare the audience the fisherwoman's oft-mentioned odor shows the same editorial intelligence. What the Wicker 4DX experiment actually demonstrates is that the format's ceiling isn't action — it's physical comedy. The moving chairs don't amplify danger; they amplify bodily surprise. A car crash and a headboard shattering under Skarsgård's wicker shoulders are mechanically identical events for the seat's actuators. But the audience response is completely different: one is adrenaline, the other is helpless laughter. The screams-at-a-Taylor-Swift-concert noise level reported from Times Square wasn't fear — it was the specific derangement of being physically jostled through a scene you are already finding absurd. Black Bear's gamble also reframes what a small-budget art-house release can do with format differentiation. Wicker opened fifth at the North American box office. Their previous US theatrical release, the Sydney Sweeney vehicle Christy, bombed outright. The 4DX event wasn't a Hail Mary so much as a precise read of where the film's energy actually lived — in its virality, in its TikTok 'getting that wick' clips, in the audience that dragged a friend with a wicker basket to a midnight screening to cope with a breakup. The distributor found its tribe and gave them a reason to leave the house. The more interesting question the piece raises but doesn't quite answer is: who programs these things? The gap between a competent 4DX translation and one that lands as comedy is entirely in the timing and intensity calibration of the seat effects. Someone made the call that the village normies get jackhammer taps and Skarsgård gets the full treatment, and that person is doing something closer to comedic editing than technical execution. That craft is currently uncredited and undiscussed, and it shouldn't be. Whether this opens a door for erotic or comedic 4DX more broadly depends on whether studios and distributors are paying attention. The format's limitation has never been technical — it's been imaginative. Wicker didn't unlock a new hardware capability. It unlocked a new way of thinking about what the hardware is for. That's rarer, and more useful.
