Till yesterday you watched a film. From today you can smell it too.

Even as the 3D wave picks up in town, Robert Rodriguez’s latest Spy Kids film — All the Time in the World — arrives on Friday in 4D format. The fourth dimension in question, unlike 4D shows in movie theme parks, is achieved not by water-sprinklers or bucking seats, but by the scent of things on screen. Or as the makers of the film are calling it — Aroma-Scope.

In select plexes — INOX (Forum), Fame (South City) and Cinemax (Mani Square) — viewers will be given a scratch-and-sniff card with the ticket. This Aroma-Scope card will have eight numbers. As the numbers flash on the screen, one will have to scratch the corresponding numbers and sniff!

Rodriguez’s reason for going 4D arose from spying on his own kids. “Just watching them with interactive gaming, you ask them to watch a movie, it just feels so passive to them. I thought, this helps bridge the gap. It’s an interactive thing, almost like playing a game while you’re watching the movie,” he has said in an interview.

Subhasis Ganguli, the regional director of INOX, too is banking on kid power. “It’s a very new thing but since the Spy Kids franchise is for younger audiences, it should be a fun do-it-yourself outing for them.” Actress Nilanjanaa Sengupta concurs. “Last year in Mumbai I went with my daughter Sara for a 4D show at a mall and smelling floral fragrances during the screening made it a super experience.”

Sniff: Razia then, Spy Kids now

Spy Kids 4 is not the first film in the world to try scratch-and-sniff. Director John Waters tried it in 1981 with Polyester and 2003’s animated film Rugrats Go Wild also used scent cards.

These films, of course, never made it to India but a select Mumbai audience back in 1983 got a whiff of this concept. It was Pakeezah director Kamal Amrohi who had caught a scent of the 4D future.

At the premiere show of his Dharmendra-Hema Malini magnum opus Razia Sultan at the Maratha Mandir theatre, during the scene where the royals are feasting on biryani, Amrohi placed a giant kadhai of biryani near a storm fan for the aroma to fill the theatre.

The Spy Kids viewers are unlikely to catch a whiff of biryani but they will have a lot of fruity flavours to smell. Most of the eight scents on the card — which Metro got to sniff on Thursday evening — seem straight out of a catalogue of chewing gum flavours. Statutory warning: There are a couple of not-so-nice smells which are being billed ‘off-odours’.

“Spotting the number on the screen, removing the 3D glasses, scratching the card, putting the glasses back on and then sniffing... sounds like too much work,” grumbles Aladin director Sujoy Ghosh, one of the more tech-savvy directors in Bollywood. “From Chhota Chetan to Avatar it was fine but now this is really pushing it.”