Immersive Cinema Deep Dive: Cosm, The Sphere, and 5,000 Empty Movie Theaters - with Lance Loesberg and Jeremy Dalton

Immersive Cinema Deep Dive: Cosm, The Sphere, and 5,000 Empty Movie Theaters — with Lance Loesberg and Jeremy Dalton

Bob sits down with two people who have been building immersive entertainment since the earliest days: Lance Loesberg, who ran Virtuality's North American business in the 1990s and went on to pioneer 360° video production at BigLook360, and Jeremy Dalton, who built and led PwC's first dedicated immersive technology team before launching XRHQ.

The three dig into the new wave of immersive cinema — Cosm's half-dome reimagining of The Matrix, The Sphere's AI-expanded Wizard of Oz, and ABBA Voyage's $175 million virtual concert — and ask the hard business questions: what did the content cost, who is actually making money, and can any of it scale?

Then Bob connects the dots to a stat that should have every cinema owner's attention: roughly 40% of opening-weekend box office for tentpole films now comes from about 2% of screens — the IMAX ones — while thousands of underused auditoriums sit idle. With free-roam VR experiences like Horizons of Khufu generating nearly $30 million in ticket sales on less than $100K of deployable hardware, the empty movie theater might be immersive entertainment's biggest real-estate opportunity.

Chapters:

• 00:00 Intro: two guests, 30 years of immersive history
• 00:32 Lance's journey: Virtuality pods, laser tag arcades, and the GM 360° VR test drive
• 04:49 Jeremy's journey: building PwC's immersive team, deploying headsets in 50+ countries, launching XRHQ
• 07:51 Why now: gaming's shakeout and the shift to premium immersive formats
• 08:47 Cosm explained: "a planetarium on steroids" — and how The Matrix was adapted
• 14:07 Ticket pricing, F&B, and whether an $80M venue pencils
• 17:30 ABBA Voyage: $175M in content costs and what it proved
• 20:31 The Sphere: "the most immersive experience outside a headset," Postcard from Earth, and the Wizard of Oz AI controversy
• 23:05 IMAX vs. the death spiral: 40% of opening box office on 2% of screens
• 26:06 Studios vs. cinema owners: the broken distribution window
• 31:57 Shooting for VR: Doug Liman's Asteroid and why headset filmmaking is its own craft
• 34:27 Horizons of Khufu economics: ~$30M in tickets on under $100K of CapEx — and why free-roam VR fits inside a theater
• 38:20 Are headsets scalable? Adoption, Gen Alpha, and the niche-vs-mainstream question
• 43:50 Closing question: the one classic movie each would turn into a free-roam VR experience
• 47:18 Bonus: is location-based VR actually making money? Sandbox economics, Zero Latency, Eclipso

Guests:

• Lance Loesberg — BigLook360, VR content studio and 360° video pioneer: https://www.biglook360.com/
• Jeremy Dalton — founder, XRHQ; former head of PwC's immersive technologies team: https://xrhq.com/

Bob's Sandbox economics deep dive: https://bobcooney.com/sandbox-vr-franchise-economics/