Tech's storytelling evolution

After years of flirting with it and embellishing it, is technology about to overwhelm storytelling? IMAX, an immersive screen experience designed in the sixties, was used largely by museums and to make natural history documentaries.

- VANITA KOHLI-KHANDEKAR

After an investment banking firm he ran with a partner acquired IMAX in 1994, lawyer/entrepreneur Richard Gelfond, now chief executive officer, came on board. It was almost impossible to get mainstream studios and theatre chains to use the technology that was wonderful to watch movies on, but was clunky and expensive. In 2001, an in-house algorithm that allowed reformatting regular films to IMAX helped push costs down. That is around the time theatres began digitising and filmmakers also started using IMAX equipment for making films.

By 2006, films like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Happy Feet and Transformers, made the IMAX format less of an oddity. James Cameron's science fiction superhit Avatar (2009) mainstreamed it completely. The 163 IMAX screens (then) brought in roughly $250 million (9 per cent) of the almost $3 billion the film grossed globally. By 2023, the technology was available in 1,705 screens over the world - less than one per cent of the total. Yet it brought in over 3.5 per cent (over a billion dollars) of the global box office. That is because people are willing to pay three to five times the price of a regular ticket to watch an "IMAX" film.