'Odyssey' and beyond: Where to sit in premium screens for the best experience

Movie theaters are packed with moviegoers over the Liberation Day holiday weekend, and the biggest draw is "Odyssey," director Christopher Nolan's latest film. The first feature-length narrative film ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, it has sparked an unprecedented scramble for premium-screen tickets as audiences seek out the full scale and impact of the experience.

Beyond IMAX, theaters are offering a range of premium formats including ScreenX and 4DX — all priced roughly 1.5 to 2 times more than a standard ticket, promising deeper immersion and a more cinematic experience. But even within the same premium auditorium, where you sit can make all the difference. With complaints circulating online about catching nothing but Odysseus's chin from the front row of an IMAX screen, it is worth knowing where the real sweet spots are.

The center of an auditorium is widely considered the prime seat regardless of screen type. In IMAX, however, virtually every seat — corner seats aside — is a sweet spot for sound. The picture is a different matter.

Brian Bonnick, a former chief technology officer who spent nearly two decades at IMAX, once told an interviewer that "every seat in an IMAX theater is a good seat." Because IMAX designs the position and angle of each speaker in advance to spread the acoustic sweet spot across the entire auditorium, audiences can hear the sound exactly as intended without sitting in the center.

Speaker placement aside, whether you can take in the full picture is another question entirely. The industry rule of thumb is to sit one-third of the way from the back — about two-thirds of the way back from the screen.

Nolan himself said as much in a 2023 exclusive interview with the AP, noting that for a CinemaScope (2.35:1) film he prefers the third row center, while for IMAX 1.43:1 he favors somewhere just behind the middle of the house.

Sitting too close forces viewers to pan their heads left and right to follow the action, leading to what is sometimes called "tennis neck." For foreign-language films, the bigger practical problem is that subtitles and the image become nearly impossible to take in simultaneously from the front rows. Sitting too far back, on the other hand, diminishes the overwhelming sense of scale that is the whole point of IMAX.

If "Odyssey" owns IMAX this summer, "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" is shaping up to be the definitive ScreenX experience.

CJ 4DPlex partnered with Sony Pictures from the production stage, meaning the side screens were not an afterthought added in post. Camera angles were chosen with the left and right panels in mind from the start, giving ScreenX audiences a panoramic field of view and a sense of spatial depth that a standard screen cannot replicate.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton said the CJ 4DPlex team was on set to capture dedicated ScreenX footage, adding that audiences "will be able to enjoy a new and original cinematic experience."

Because ScreenX wraps the image across the side walls, the key to finding the ideal seat is locating a position where both walls enter your field of vision at equal angles. The sweet spot — which varies by theater size — is generally the center row, in a seat that sits symmetrically between the two side panels.

Front-row seats are best avoided. In the first or second row, the side panels extend behind the audience, forcing viewers to crane their necks sharply to either side, which undercuts rather than enhances immersion. Off-center seats create their own problem: one wall looms too close while the other recedes, producing a lopsided image that breaks the wraparound effect.