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Cosm Domes brings Harry Potter world to life

Food Hall is seen at the 'Warner Bros Studio Tour Tokyo — The Making of Harry Potter' during a press preview in Tokyo, Japan. — Reuters
 
Food Hall is seen at the 'Warner Bros Studio Tour Tokyo — The Making of Harry Potter' during a press preview in Tokyo, Japan. — Reuters

⁠Transforming family movie nights into enveloping spectacles and offering viewers a ringside seat ​for sports, US-based ​Cosm Domes want to give their customers a new kind of immersive entertainment: a towering LED dome.
'It feels like being inside the film. It feels real', Jay Rinsky, founder and CEO of Little Cinema, the creative studio behind what Cosm calls its 'shared ⁠reality experiences', said.
Cosm has so far opened Domes in Los ⁠Angeles and Dallas, with further venues planned for Atlanta, Detroit and Cleveland.
Screenings are paired with themed food and drinks and photo opportunities; and fans are encouraged to ‌dress as their favourite characters.
For instance, when ​watching the shared ⁠reality version of the film 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's ​Stone', created in partnership with Warner ‌Bros, the audience can also drink a butterbeer, a fizzy beverage with a butterscotch flavour that's ​a favourite of Hogwarts students.
'Shared reality combines the physical — with all of us together — and digital technology', said Alexis Scalice, Cosm's vice president of business development and entertainment.
Little Cinema and Warner Bros Pictures launched their multi-film collaboration in ‌2025 with immersive screenings of 'The Matrix', followed by 'Willy Wonka and ​the Chocolate Factory'.
The screening of the first 'Harry Potter' marks the 25th anniversary of ​the ‌film ⁠that first brought the J K Rowling books about the boy wizard to the silver screen.
Cosm's technology seeks to create the next generation ​of experience, with visuals that make audiences feel ⁠as though they're flying ​through Hogwarts or playing Quidditch on broomsticks.
Rinsky said the process was complex and years in the making. The biggest challenge, he said, was adapting a traditional rectangular film frame to fit a dome, a ​creative leap that helped define what cinema could be.
'The film ​is always the hero and we're adding emotional enhancement through visual storytelling', Rinsky said. — Reuters