According to Mark Welton, president of Imax Theatres, the appeal of the premium large format is the impact it has on movies. "We event-asize movies," he said. "People want to shoot their movies in Imax because it means that it's a quality movie. It's a big blockbuster." But the Imax brand's jump into the mainstream film space didn’t happen overnight.
The company was founded in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada in 1967 after four Canadians bought the rights to the rolling loop film movement system from an Australian inventor. The technology allowed Imax's massive film stock to be projected onto a giant curved screen, giving viewers a sense of immersion and a unique theatrical experience.
Imax quickly established itself as an educational format with films like 1971's Canadian travelogue North of Superior — a documentary that showcased Northern Ontario and, true to Imax form, culminated in a raging fire intended to offer a sort of terrifying sense of immersion. Movies like this worked to advertise the company as a purveyor of nature documentaries. And that's how Imax was seen for decades: an interesting oddity to be witnessed in museums but kept out of mainstream theatres because of the overwhelming cost of building Imax screens, and the additional effort for studios to film with their bulky, expensive cameras that required immense amounts of film.
It wasn't until a push in the late 1990s and early 2000s by Imax CEO Richard Gelfond, combined with a cost-effective shift to digital formats, that Imax began to gain a firm foothold in Hollywood films. That presence exploded in 2009, with the success of fellow Canadian James Cameron's Avatar, a blockbuster that brought in nearly three billion dollars at the box office, with $250 million coming from Imax screens. That latter figure alone would have been enough to make it one of highest earning films of the year.
Welton says that, to studios, it helped make the concept of blockbuster synonymous with Imax.
There are now 1,800 Imax theatres in 90 countries. But studios still fight for a space in the coveted schedule of Imax movies, which are staggered so they don't cannibalize one another's success. It's made for some banner years. As of October, the company had pulled in $239 million globally. That's less than the previous year's total of $347 million, when both Oppenheimer and Mission: Impossible were in rotation. And it pales in comparison to the company's projections for 2025: $1.2 billion.
It's made for some banner years. As of October, the company had pulled in $239 million globally. That's less than the previous year's total of $347 million, when both Oppenheimer and Mission: Impossible were in rotation. And it pales in comparison to the company's projections for 2025: $1.2 billion.
Zach Lipovsky, director of the upcoming digital Imax film Final Destination: Bloodlines, says the appetite to make Imax films is at an all-time high, for both studios and filmmakers. For filmmakers like himself, there's a widening of possibilities. When Oppenheimer, a film that's mostly dialogue, found such wide success, he says it changed the expectation for what kind of movies could be considered Imax films. That inspired filmmakers who wouldn't necessarily have thought of their movies as possible Imax projects to instead consider what the technology could offer.
But more important, he said, is how studios see that Imax stamp. "If you get to be chosen to be one of the films that's on Imax, it is a huge bonus to the amount of box office that your film can make," he said. "Every filmmaker would want it, but it's really in the hands of Imax as a distributor … They get to choose the films that they think are going to benefit them as much as the filmmakers."
The Imax format can also lead to early boosts in attendance. When Dune Part Two first premiered, its Imax tickets made up 20 per cent of its global box office by its second weekend. Lipovsky says that kind of huge attention is shifting studio strategies, with less attention given to smaller, character driven movies.
Though Oppenheimer proved you don't need to be Jurassic Park to warrant the use of Imax cameras, he says studios still need something that feels larger than life to justify the cost. For that reason, when they look for Imax movies, they're increasingly choosing bigger tent-pole productions to guarantee dependable box-office returns.
"These studios really need money at this point, because the cost of making stuff is going up, and the amount of people going to the theatres is going down," Lipovsky said. And though the company is set to debut four more cameras, which will allow two Imax shoots to occur concurrently, there's still a finite number of Imax cameras — eight currently. That bottleneck combined with increased attention he said, will start to impact the type of movies that get made at the highest level — and the types of directors that get to make them.