Word: imaxed
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...Since IMAX went public in June 1994, its stock price has risen from about $6.75 a share to $29 in March before settling at about $22. That makes the company worth around $650 million. The two co-bosses took advantage of that upturn to sell 100,000 shares each recently, but analysts still see IMAX as a coming attraction. "It's a very undervalued company," says senior analyst Steven Bernard at Everen Securities. "We don't think it's well known on Wall Street...
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...
...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...
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...