This is per a new report from The Wall Street Journal, looking into what has become one of the most fought-over chunks of theatrical real estate in America at the moment: The thousand-plus screens that are billed as offering “The IMAX Experience,” all of which have been pretty much booked up through 2027. (IMAX dictates which films get its screens, usually picking only one—and at most two—movies to occupy them on any given week.) The fact is, IMAX has become big business for movie theaters, spurred on by the success of films like The Dark Knight and Avatar in the format, and by the company branching out in the late 2000s with a digital projection system that allowed it to convert hundreds of screens in existing theaters into IMAX-branded displays. (This has had its own knock-on effects, as resolution fiends have complained that these much smaller screens get billed the same as the old, huge IMAX screens—the phrase “Lie-MAX” is sometimes employed—but the effect on the average movie-goer doesn’t seem to have been as pronounced.)
As the WSJ report notes, IMAX is having a serious moment right now, as filmmakers make pilgrimages to the company’s New York offices to sell their films as worthy of the format, and the company has become the crux of, for example, Netflix’s big effort to appease director Greta Gerwig with a brief theatrical run for her upcoming Narnia movie. (Theater-agnostic streaming execs were apparently convinced that IMAX was different enough from the streaming experience to allow the deal to go down.) The demand, per experts, is spurred on from two different directions. For one thing, theaters just really, really like IMAX, which allows them to charge several extra bucks per ticket in a box office that has never matched the heights it was charting back in 2019. (Congratulations: The word “premiumization” has now entered your eyes and curled around your brainstem, from where you will never dislodge it.) IMAX gets roughly 18 percent of that extra cash, making for a pretty plum deal on both sides.
Which ties into the second reason: Fairly or not, IMAX has built a reputation in consumers’ brains for being much more distinct of an experience than a regular trip to the theater. If the biggest existential question facing cinemas right now is “Why is going out and watching something any better than watching a movie on my big-ass TV at home?” then the format has become one of the only answers that actually seem to work. (The report notes that IMAX ticket sales are up 16 percent this year, compared to the dismal 2.4 percent increase for traditional screens, while films like F1 did 15 percent of their business in the format, despite it only making up 1 percent of worldwide screens.)
Which is all a pretty wild amount of star-making power to suddenly drop into the laps of a company that had been trucking along since the late ’60s—with only a few hundred screens to its name for most of that run—but here we are, with films shuffling around on the calendar to score the coveted spots, Christopher Nolan using his reputation to secure a four-week exclusive release for his The Odyssey, and guys like the producer of Sonic The Hedgehog 4 apparently showing IMAX execs super-secret early footage of their movies to try to secure a berth for their films more than a year in advance. IMAX is suddenly a kingmaker, and the fight for its highly coveted screens doesn’t seem to be cooling off any time soon.
