IT opens on Cosm’s 87-foot LED domes on August 28, playing Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta. It is the first horror title Cosm has programmed, and the fourth film in the company’s “Shared Reality” series, after The Matrix, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
The tagline on the key art is “Don’t see IT alone.”
What IT Is About
The 2017 film adapts the first half of Stephen King’s novel. A group of children in Derry, Maine, who call themselves the Losers’ Club, are hunted by a shape-shifting entity that feeds on them and most often appears as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Andy Muschietti directed, from a screenplay by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman. Cosm’s release calls it the highest-grossing horror film of all time.
How the Dome Differs From a Movie Theater
The obvious question for anyone who has seen IT on a big screen already is what 87 feet of LED buys that IMAX does not. Three things, and one absence.
The screen is over your head, not in front of you. Cosm’s venues are built around a single 87-foot-diameter, 12K+ LED dome rather than a flat or gently curved wall. The image occupies peripheral and overhead vision, which is the part a conventional auditorium cannot reach no matter how large the screen gets. Cosm says guests watch without a headset.
The content is rebuilt for the dome, not enlarged. Cosm describes using “proprietary fulldome production technology” on the film. The company’s Cirque du Soleil program is the clearest precedent for what that means in practice: Cosm’s description of the O presentation promises vantage points not available to someone sitting in the Bellagio theater watching the show live. A fulldome version is a re-composition, not a projection.
It is a bar and restaurant with a dome in it. Each venue holds roughly 1,700 guests across multiple levels, sells reserved seating and general admission separately, and runs a full-service bar and kitchen with entrees and shareable plates. Cosm Los Angeles is a 65,000 square foot building next to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. Dallas sits in the Grandscape development in The Colony. Atlanta is a 70,000 square foot, three-level venue at Centennial Yards. Reviewing the LA venue for Attractions Magazine in February 2025, Jeff DePaoli wrote that the pre-show environments were convincing enough that he thought he was walking outdoors until he got close to the screen.
What has not been announced is any physical effect. Cosm’s release describes “intensified sound design and dynamic environments” that “supplement the film beyond its original format,” and says the goal is to “redefine the jump scare.” It does not mention haptics, scent, air movement, motion seating, or live performers. On the evidence released so far this is a film presentation in a room engineered for immersion, not a walkthrough attraction, and operators reading this should calibrate accordingly. Cosm has also not said whether the running time changes or how much of the original edit survives.
Cosm Is Selling the Crowd
The key art tagline is doing the real work. “Don’t see IT alone” is not a claim about resolution, it is a claim about the room, and Cosm’s definition of Shared Reality says the format “merges state-of-the-art visuals with the energy of the crowd.”
That argument has support in our own reporting. Allen Hopps of Dark Hour Haunted House told us in January that “the worst date you could go on is going to the movies,” because “you sit there in the dark and don’t talk to each other for two hours, and then the date’s over and you go home.” He was making a case for interactive haunts, and he cited a 2024 University of Florida study, Haunted Attraction: The Effects of Recreational Fear on Interpersonal Bonding, which found that sharing a frightening experience made participants feel closer to the people they shared it with. The study’s finding was that the bonding happened after the scare, through talking and laughing and reflecting together, rather than during it.
A venue with tiered seating, a bar, a kitchen, and outdoor decks is built for exactly that second half. Whether it delivers the first half is the open question, because the scare itself is still something happening on a screen.
On Green Tagged in April we argued that physical spaces that bring people together are the competitive advantage in entertainment right now, and that the thing worth investing in is whatever a venue offers that a screen cannot. Cosm is an unusual test of that idea, because it is selling a screen and betting the room around it is the product.
IT Teaches Us Fear
Alexis Scalice, vice president of business development and entertainment at Cosm, said in the release: “Together, we are taking horror beyond the frame, creating an immersive experience to deliver thrills unlike anything fans have experienced before.”
Jay Rinsky, chief creative officer at Little Cinema, said: “The Matrix taught us to question reality itself, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory taught us wonder, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone taught us magic. IT teaches us fear, and we’re treating every shadow, every silence, and every red balloon as a chance to invent something the medium hasn’t seen yet.”
The production is a collaboration between Cosm, Warner Bros. Pictures, Little Cinema, New Line Cinema, and Double Dream, the company founded by IT filmmakers Andy and Barbara Muschietti.
Dates, Tickets, and Age Policy
IT in Shared Reality opens August 28, 2026 at Cosm Los Angeles, Cosm Dallas, and Cosm Atlanta. Cosm Detroit gets the title at a later date the company has not set.
The film carries its original R rating, so guests under 17 need an accompanying parent or adult guardian. Ticket pricing and on-sale timing have not been announced. Cosm is taking signups on its IT in Shared Reality page.
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