We all have seen the rise of the large format releases led by IMAX and other companies take over the lion’s share of boxoffice for megahit movies and super-effects blockbusters in the past few years. There are always more big screens a-building and more films desiring release in these crowd-pleasing big-ticket-price venues which, of course, trump the appeal of large screen home videos on which many moviegoers had watched, and especially re-watched such films.
But this, in turn, had led to scheduling complexities for the studios and exhibitors because, in peak summer and holiday seasons, there are only so many huge screens to go around. This week’s big premiere is always quickly bumped in favor of the next movie in line within two or three or even one week of the premiere. The landscape is shifting all the time, and the profit or loss of big-budget epics hangs in the balance with no real sure-fire scheduling technique yet found and a whole lot of them found to fail.
Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) attempts to make repairs on the Hill Valley Clocktower in Back To The Future – YouTube, MovieClips
However, this clash of the titan big-screen super-sound movies gets the headlines but ignores a bigger question perhaps: What happens when the premiere production release season wanes and these pricey-to-visit but pricey-to-build venues may not have brand new content available to fill theatergoers’ eyes and ears?
Well, we are now seeing some interesting solutions being proposed and, once this summer ends and the kids go back to school, we’ll see how they work out.
Since we here at TPP try to keep you ahead of the culture curve, we’ll give you a preview of huge-format coming attractions being planned for as soon as September and beyond to fill the gap until the year-end holidays roll around (and we presume the same ideas will, if successful, be worked during the springtime post-New-Years’ release lull, too.)
Ned Beatty as Otis in Superman: The Movie (1978), Warner Bros. Pictures
Interestingly enough, one such plan basically sings the “theme song” of our “Genre Guys” that perhaps your best entertainment value isn’t a new film at all, but rather one that’s achieved something like classic status but was never fully exploited in the IMAX format when it first played in theaters.
Apollo 13, Ron Howard’s 1995 retelling of the ill-fated moon mission saved by all-American ingenuity and bravery is 30 this year, and to commemorate it a brand new and heretofore unseen full IMAX version will be playing from September 19th through September 25th on the big, big screens.
Although there was a limited IMAX recycling of the movie in the past, due to format demands and then-current technology quite a few minutes of run time had to be excised from the original full-length cut back then. Now the full film, with its huge FX and rumbling Saturn 5 blastoff, will shake moviegoers (and probably sell some nifty popcorn buckets) across North America.
A movie theater at Disney Springs – Photo Credit: M. Montanaro
There are lots of other semi-recent “classics” that would be perfect for such conversion and with so many movies we loved reaching milestone anniversaries, the chance to bring them to old and new audiences in the theater venue instead of just the relative isolation of your basement bigscreen abounds.
In a way, this is a new “take” on those special-release “Fathom” presentations of operas and concerts that used to fill the “dead air” periods but have blown up literally and figuratively to true event status. I expect we’ll see many, many more.
We recently saw Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar come back in IMAX, Black Swan is coming back in IMAX in August for its 15th anniversary (and as a prelude to director Darren Aronofsky’s new movie, Caught Stealing a week later,) the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies are coming back for their IMAX re-do, the Spider-Man movies are returning including a 4k version, and Jaws is back in IMAX for its 50th anniversary August 29th with the clever ad tagline “We’re gonna need a bigger screen.”
Doc and Marty at the Twin Pines Mall in Back to The Future – YouTube, Universal Pictures
The OTHER option? Just because a hit or semi-hit current film has come and gone from the big, big screens and moved on to home video streaming doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for it in IMAX again. F-1 is returning to IMAX soon, and is sure to pick up more bigscreen eyes-and-ears since it was forced off the large format screens by follow-on releases. And concert/documentary films about artists such as the Grateful Dead and Prince are coming later this year, too.
Certainly these are all limited runs of a week or three or four, but they will do wonders not only for the theaters but for IMAX Corporation itself which, naturally, gets a cut of that big box office. I might also add that this trend will only further enhance the incomes of the museum- and aquarium-based Imax screens that used to survive only on short 40-minute nature documentaries but are now showing Hollywood IMAX mainline product too.
A Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Tri-Star Pictures
So, however you slice it, old films and recent releases are getting new life with IMAX expansions and surely this trend will help fill these pricey venues during the “off season” times well into the future. The true irony, perhaps, is that the OTHER theater trend of adding more and more commercials to the pre-shows means those classics will come with more baggage than they were ever burdened with in their original runs.
Do you want to see classic films come to IMAX? Sound off in the comments and let us know!
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