There were tanking box-office numbers and shuttered theatres. There were Hollywood strikes. There was even Harold and the Purple Crayon.

But alongside what looked like a cratering movie industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was actually a stunning ray of hope. Imax, the Canadian-created and owned technology, has been exploding in popularity, especially as dwindling attendance has spurred fears of audiences never returning to theatres.

It’s part of a longer, but steady process that has, over the decades, turned the brand into a sort of certificate of quality for audiences, and an obsession of studios.

“We ‘event-asize’ movies,” said Mark Welton, president of Imax Theatres. “People want to shoot their movies in Imax … because it means that it’s a quality movie. It’s a big blockbuster.”

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The brand’s surprising jump into the mainstream film space all happened relatively recently.

The company was founded in Mississauga 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.

Canadian filmmaker and Imax co-founder Graeme Ferguson, who directed North of Superior, films a space shuttle launch for his 1982 Imax film Hail Columbia! (Roger Scruggs/Courtesy of Graeme Ferguson)

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 a $2.92 billion gross, with $250 million 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.

Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan and producers Emma Thomas and Charles Roven win the Oscar for best picture at the 96th Academy Awards in Hollywood, on March 10, 2024. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

And of course, Oppenheimer went on to win seven Oscars, including best picture, with director Christopher Nolan and producer Emma Thomas giving Imax multiple shoutouts from the stage, something Welton says he’s never seen in his almost 28 years in the industry.

“You never see a third party be announced at the Oscars.”

Appetite for Imax at all-time high

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.

Zach Lipovsky, director and chair of the DGC’s National Directors Division, says the success of Oppenheimer inspired filmmakers who wouldn’t necessarily have thought of their movies as possible Imax projects to consider what the technology could offer. (Andrew Lee/CBC)

“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 up20 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.

The strategy makes logical sense according to Clayton Davis, senior awards editor at Variety, who explained that as theatre-going declines in general, Imax has become one of the few things that makes audiences feel like going to a cinema is worth it.

“Imax really does offer a great dangling carrot, so to speak, for people to go there,” he said.

Shifting strategies

But the more that studios lean on big box-office returns as a measure of success, the more Davis says it will come to shape their decision making.

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.

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan works with an Imax camera on the set of Oppenheimer with actor Cillian Murphy. There are currently only eight Imax cameras worldwide, though the company plans to debut four more. (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures/The Associated Press)

He pointed to Alexander Payne, the celebrated director behind movies like The Holdovers, Election and Sideways, as an example of the kind of filmmaker who might not continue to get space at big studios due to these changing strategies.

“I don’t know if he asked for an Imax camera if someone’s going to give it to him,” Davis said. “Because his movies, while acclaimed, have not become the highest grossing films of all time.”

Studios will likely continue to put more of their efforts and money into bigger, more dependable blockbusters and making sure they earn a return on investment, he says, which means fewer resources available for character-driven movies that garner critical acclaim and win awards — unless they also happen to make incredible amounts of money.

It’s a strategy that could help to save the cinema, Davis says, even as it forever alters what is shown on screen.