Word: imax
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...trooped around to all the Boston sights term-time Harvard students never get a chance to see: the Science Museum and IMAX ("Everest" was good, but not that good), the Pops, Canobie Lake Park and the beach, 14-year-olds in tow. The whole experience left me wondering how much simpler and perhaps equally productive it would be if undergraduates, instead of producing endless papers, performances and projects, all got together and played a good game of blob-tag for half an hour...
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...
...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...
...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...