Theaters are always looking for an excuse to throw a surcharge on top of the price of a regular movie ticket. When James Cameron’s “Avatar” hit theaters, theater chains scrambled to install 3D projectors into their auditoriums. The gimmick of 3D allowed theaters to tack on a few extra dollars to the price of a ticket, and for a good few years, Hollywood churned out cheap 3D movies one after another. Thankfully, the 3D fad is finally beginning to die down, but theater chains have already begun push for the next movie going gimmick.

Enter the off-brand IMAX experience.

Certain theater chains, like Cinemark and Regal, have begun installing their own large-format theaters in an attempt to draw bigger crowds. Now, Columbia has one at the Regal Stadium 14 theater, and it is dubbed the RPX (Regal Premium Experience) auditorium.

So, is the “Premium Experience” simply the next iteration of the 3D gimmick? Well, yes and no.

Over the weekend, I was able to catch a screening of “Dracula Untold” in the RPX theater. Right off the bat (pun very much intended), I can tell you the screen is big. In fact, the new screen is a cool floor-to-ceiling screen that honestly looks pretty impressive. It’s just a shame that most films being shown in RPX probably aren’t going to be filmed in IMAX’s standard 70mm film format, so the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen make it seem unnecessary to have such a large screen. After about an hour of the film, I had forgotten that the screen actually reached from the floor to the ceiling. The screen sounds awesome on paper, but without the proper media format, the RPX theater looks like a regular theater screen, albeit marginally wider.

However, the audio quality of the RPX theater is something to behold. The RPX theater is certainly louder than your average theater auditorium, but the loudness isn’t what won me over. The clarity of the sound effects was top notch, and it really helped with my immersion into the film. The battle scenes of “Dracula Untold” were elevated by the brutal audio design of the swords clanging and bodies being tossed around the battlefield, and it was gratifying to get to hear that audio design in full. I would love to see a horror film in the RPX theater, though I would love it even more if a studio ever decided to film a horror picture in 70mm.

So what else is there to differentiate the RPX theater from the rest of the movie screens in Columbia? Not much, actually. The seats are leather and have extra cushioning, and you can put the armrests up if you so desire. The entrance has some neat blue lighting and an RPX logo, but none of these things are really that crucial to the moviegoing experience. It’s nice to see Regal trying to make the moviegoing experience more comfortable, but paying a surcharge to sit in a marginally cushier seat isn’t something that I would normally do.

Regarding the surcharge, I was surprised by just how steep the price was for all of this. It’s an extra five dollars for the RPX ticket, and to be perfectly honest, I just don’t see it being worth the surcharge. That is, I don’t think it’s worth the extra money to see a standard format film in the RPX theater. There are bound to be more movies filmed in IMAX, like Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” and the next “Hunger Games” installment, and when those are released you can bet that I’ll be seeing them in the RPX theater, but for the time being, I doubt I’ll be seeing many films in the RPX theater. Still, I would definitely recommend trying to catch a matinee showing in the RPX theater just to experience it for yourself.