EXCLUSIVE: As the rolling process of cinema reopenings continues across various markets, IMAX has recently enjoyed strong grosses with local-language movies in Asia as well as the reissue of Christ…
DEADLINE: How has IMAX managed through the COVID era?Okay under the circumstances. The pandemic started for us in late January because of China and then the rest of the world shut down. It’s been a difficult six months for us with no revenue. However, we have a really strong balance sheet, so it wasn’t life threatening. It was just managing through a difficult situation. And now, as you know, China is opening up followed by the rest of the world, so hopefully we have a business to talk about.
I had a board meeting a few weeks ago and said to my board there are probably 100 different scenarios that I can come up with for which countries open, what films they have… I also think there’s been a little bit of, you know, when you’re closed it’s hard to really have a narrative — you don’t have anything to talk about other than when’s it gonna open.
But this goes back to your point before, 70% of the box office is outside North America. Even though LA is important, it’s about 10% of the North American box office, so I think the industry suffers a little bit from its own myopia. I’m not the first one to say that, but I think what they know is what they see outside their windows and I think in fact that’s not the reality. Where the virus is under control, the numbers are really quite good.
I believe that the strong international results are going to convince people in the U.S. that they should go. Usually it’s the other way around when movies open in the U.S. first and I think if you look back, I don’t know of any case where COVID spread has come out of movie theaters so I don’t really understand. I understand people are cautious, but personally I think movie theaters are safer than restaurants.
But it creates a marketing buzz for the movie so it’s almost a natural curation. When you hear “filmed with IMAX cameras,” it means something special. But also for us the indexing is a lot higher, I think forwe did something crazy like over 20% of the box office and that was because it was filmed with our cameras. So even though it’s not a money maker, we do make more money because people do seek it out in IMAX.
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