In the post 8 days ago, Survivor: Movie Theaters, Usedcarsalesman gave his reasons why he did not exactly see an end to movie theaters in sight.
A couple of days later, he saw a Washington Post article detailing the growing popularity of IMAX theaters. In the article titled, The Next Big Thing, Richard Gelfond, co-chairman and co-CEO of IMAX, which is headquartered in Toronto and New York said, "Consumers are saying, in order to get me out of the home, you need to wow me, you need to give me something special.'"
Usedcarsalesman wholeheartedly agrees with Mr. Gelfond's statement. And, as a matter of fact, so does the public it seems. IMAX Theater attendance is apparently up by 37% over the last fiscal year.
For those who aren't familiar with it, Usedcarsalesman will fill you in on his own experience with IMAX. In 1976, The Air and Space Museum opened in Washington D.C. along with its Samuel P. Langley IMAX theater (today known as the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater). As a kid and young-adult growing up in and around D.C., Usedcarsalesman's first exposure to a giant-screen IMAX projection system was in this theater IMAX was in the theater.
The "Langley" (now Lockheed) IMAX screen measured 75-feet wide and 50-feet high; by comparison, your basic theater screen was and is about 30-by-20. IMAX, as the world's largest film format, used and still uses a frame three times larger than the wide-screen 70mm format and 10 times larger than the basic 35mm format used in most movie theaters then and today. So as a little kid, Usedcarsalesman was understandably, especially impressed by the large, IMAX experience; and, this was in around 1977-1978 when people were looking to have their first go at that hip new arcade game, Space Invaders.
The first movie Usedcarsalesman saw on the 5-story Air and Space IMAX screen was called To Fly. This film fit that IMAX theater like a Saville Row suit, the content seemingly tailor-made for the awesome size of the screen. In one segment of the film, a camera facing downward from a plane's belly shows the audience an overhead view of the ground and continues with this vantage as the plane flies over a cliff. Usedcarsalesman still recalls the feeling of nauseating vertigo he had the first time he saw the ground fall away in to a steep canyon! That's the kind of impact that the screen has induced upon its viewers. Usedcarsalesman saw To Fly again in the late 1990's at the Air and Space on the same IMAX screen and it was still just as fun to watch as in the 1970s.
Obviously, IMAX has been around for a while -- the technology is 40 years old. And it can have a big, powerful effect on an audience. However, most modern multiplex theaters are simply not equipped to accommodate the 5-story tall screen used to show the IMAX feature. Usedcarsalesman doesn't know if this means that theater-goers are going to see U.S. theater chains ripping the roofs off their current houses to accommodate vertigo-inducing IMAX screens. It might, since IMAX screens are seemingly a growth attraction for an otherwise stagnant industry
However, Usedcarsalesman thinks that you're probably more likely to see IMAX just in newly contructed private theater complexes. But, the fact that IMAX viewer-ship is up while regular movie-theater attendance is down shows that, hey, at least in some venue-type is drawing more people to buy tickets. Theater operators just need to give the public more of this kind of reason -- IMAX (or maybe 3D without glasses) -- to go out to a movie theater
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