'Blast Processing all over again': Marvel's Infinity Vision badge on Avengers: Doomsday isn't fooling anyone
The new Doomsday one-sheet wears a logo that didn't exist a year ago, in the corner where an Avengers poster usually wears IMAX. The story of how it got there is the story of a screen war Marvel already lost.
The premium-format posters for Avengers: Doomsday went out this week, Doctor Doom front and center, and the badge under the December 18 date reads "Infinity Vision." Not IMAX — because on December 18 there is no IMAX for Marvel to sell.
Dune: Part Three opens the same day, and Warner Bros. and Legendary locked up North America's roughly 400 IMAX screens for three weeks. Denis Villeneuve shot much of his film with IMAX cameras, exhibitors sided with the filmmaker, and Disney, which could have moved its date, stayed put. So the biggest Marvel release since Endgame goes into the double booking fans call Dunesday without the format that captured up to a quarter of a tentpole's opening weekend.
What Disney did instead was invent a format of its own — or rather, a sticker.
What Infinity Vision actually is
- A certification, not a technology. Unveiled at CinemaCon in April, it's a label Disney grants to existing premium large format screens: at least 50 feet wide, laser projection, 7.1-channel sound, per specs reported by Bloomberg.
- The pitch, in Disney's words: the badge "signals to audiences which auditoriums offer the biggest, brightest and most immersive experience."
- The scale: more than 75 domestic and 300 international auditoriums qualified at launch, with over 7,500 applications from theaters by late June.
- The rollout: the label debuted on September 25 with the Avengers: Endgame re-release, a dry run before Doomsday becomes its first original release.
There is honest precedent for this: Lucasfilm did it in 1983, when THX certification launched alongside Return of the Jedi. There is less honest precedent too, and it's the one that fits better. In the early '90s, Sega needed an answer to the Super Nintendo and invented "Blast Processing" — a term that described no particular technology, existed only in advertising, and worked anyway, because it gave the customer a word where the competitor had none.
Infinity Vision is Blast Processing with a laser projector. The badge's real function is on the ticket page: without it, a Doomsday listing on opening day would say what Disney cannot afford to say out loud — that the premium option is across the hall, playing Dune.
The first full Doomsday trailer, released in July, ended with an advertisement. Not for a date or a ticket on-sale — for Infinity Vision.
It's working, which is the uncomfortable part
Among people who track formats, nobody is confused about what a certification sticker is. Among everyone else, the numbers say the word is doing its job. Domestic presales passed $50 million by early September, and over 70 percent of those tickets were sold through Infinity Vision screenings — a figure Disney CFO Hugh Johnston called "unprecedented" for a film more than three months out.
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The precedent Disney is clinging to is Barbie, which lost every IMAX screen to Oppenheimer in 2023 and grossed $1.4 billion anyway. The difference is that Barbie never pretended otherwise. On December 18, Marvel's most loyal ticket-buyers will watch the biggest film of the year on the second-biggest screen in the building, under a badge invented so they wouldn't have to be told.
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