The advent of new technologies in cinema, theatre and virtual reality together with increasing demands for new content, are pushing the boundaries of filmmaking and storytelling to the limits of our imaginations. The potential for 3D film to blur the line between virtual storytelling and social network gaming is not just hypothetical. These technologies now incorporate audiences and players that are actors in the virtual world themselves. They often encounter other actors they are familiar with in virtual or real-life. In social psychology, familiarity is a robust phenomenon demonstrating that just being familiar to someone causes preference and increased positive affect to them. In this paper, the role of familiarity in the visual perception and user experience is investigated. To test our findings, stereoscopic film scenarios were developed. An experiment has been conducted to see if annoyance present on a stereoscopic film content outweighs the user experience over familiarity. This paper argues that a stereoscopic 3D film technology seems to gain more from increased emotional relevance than from higher quality resolutions.