Imax Gets Bigger (By Getting Smaller)

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Suburban movie-theater owners say that in a world of media choices, the bulked-up metroplex is the best way to keep customers coming. "People want a reason to leave home," says Dennis Kucherawy, vice president of corporate relations at Famous Players, a Viacom subsidiary that is building IMAX theaters in Canada. "We wanted to restore the excitement of the movie palace of the past. We are building the movie palace of the future."

The movie palace of the future isn't cheap to build: as much as $8 million for an IMAX screen, in contrast to about $1 million for a conventional one. The projection system uses the largest commercial film format available--15-perforation 70 mm--10 times as large as conventional 35 mm. But IMAX and the theater owners hope to scale down costs too, for instance by replacing the $300 liquid-crystal eyeglasses used for 3-D movies with disposable polarized goggles. (The 3-D system can also show 2-D movies like Everest) IMAX films are shorter, so more customers can file in--450,000 a year, nine times the attendance at conventional movies.

Going smaller has some bigger risks, though. Locations such as museums are foolproof so long as there are class trips. But by becoming more commercial, IMAX will have to compete more directly with Hollywood. Industry ticket sales increased 3.7% last year, to 1.38 billion. But the number of films increased at nearly twice that rate, as did the number of screens. So the market is hardly bubbling. And IMAX faces some competition from big-screen rivals such as Iwerks and MegaSystems

A bigger problem may be finding enough big films to fill all those big screens. IMAX is expanding its role as a producer and trying to strike more deals with studios, which have yet to embrace large-format films. The company now has some 20 big-screen projects in the works on subjects ranging from T. Rex (shot by Lawnmower Man director Brett Leonard) to (shhh, the deal isn't final yet!) Star Trek and 3-D animation. A recent release, Amazon, is a story of tribal shaman Julio Mamani and ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin.

Greg MacGillivray, producer and director of Everest, believes IMAX films like Amazon will revive the old concept of "films as road shows," with megasize movies rotating among 100 or so theaters and attracting residents from miles around. "I think you'll see them in every city with more than 300,000 people and in some cities with fewer than that. With nonfiction stories in spectacular settings, it will work really well," he predicts.

Don't expect every film to get IMAXed. "As Good as It Gets is as good as it should be in 35 mm," says MacGillivray. But, he adds, speaking for all the 10-year-olds in North America, "Star Wars in IMAX would be great."

--Reported by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles and Aixa M. Pascual/New York