Imax CEO Rich Gelfond Talks "The Odyssey' Sellouts

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Katie Griefeld** (0:07)
Let's get to our top story this hour. It's one of the year's most anticipated films delivering big time in the box office. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, the number one film in the US and Canada in its debut weekend, posting nearly $125 million in ticket sales. Now a large portion of the weekend's box office performance generated from screenings in Imax's giant auditoriums, many of which were sold out months in advance. Let's discuss with Richard Gelfond. He is the CEO of Imax. Joining us on set, Rich, it's great to see you.

**Rich Gelfond** (0:41)
It's great to be here, thank you.

**Katie Griefeld** (0:43)
So I want to start there. You think about the large auditoriums. That's where people want to see The Odyssey. It's very hard to do. I mean, there's been viral social media posts that even if you want to see a 2 a.m., a 3 a.m. screening, it's sold out. You can't get in.
I mean, is there a plan to expand this to more theaters, more auditoriums around the world?

**Rich Gelfond** (1:05)
So I've got to divide it into pieces.
One is there's lots of availability in Imax globally, and we have about 2,000 screens.
A subset of that is film screens, because Chris Nolan was the first director to ever film an entire movie with Imax cameras. So if you want to see it captured in Imax film, projected in film, you could only do that at the film theaters. Our network overall has done very well. It was a record opening for us. We did $52 million on a like-for-like basis, the highest we've ever had. In fact, it was almost 50 percent above Oppenheimer, which went on to be a huge success. So the question is about, there are lots of Imax digital theaters, the film ones are rare. In a way, though, those theaters are like the Rolls Royce. And the economics around them are very high-end. You have to put them in a very big auditorium with a very big, special-to-me screen. Film prints are $50,000 for one print at one theater. So you have to get tremendous amounts of capacity. So fortunately, in the places it is, it's worked very well. So at the TCL in LA, we did $500,000 in one day, in one screen, which is an incredible number. And as you said in your intro, people are flying places. So the economic model doesn't really work to put Imax film on every corner, but fortunately, there are a lot of digital theaters, so people can go to those.

**Katie Griefeld** (2:45)
Absolutely. So I hear what you're saying there, but I mean, knowing what you know now about, you know, what a hit this has turned out to be, what demand has looked like. I mean, in the run up, would you have planned anything differently about this rollout?

**Rich Gelfond** (2:58)
Well, for Oppenheimer, we only had 30 film theaters and we have 40% more for this one.
We knew it was going to be very big, Partly because it was the first film shot completely with Imax cameras. We invented a new camera in order for Chris to make this film, partly because we know Chris, and conquering a story like the Odyssey, he thinks big, and we are big in a lot of ways. So we knew there's not really much we could have done. We kind of scoured the world to try and find film projectors, and we added shows in almost every theater. So we added, in 42 theaters, we added shows between midnight and 3 a.m. I mean, the 6 a.m.s were sold out. In London, at the BFI, we've already sold out a large number of shows in weeks seven and eight. So just stop and think about that now. Two months from now. So we were prepared, but there's not more we could have done really.

**Sally Bakewell** (3:59)
So thinking about the bigger picture, Imax expects that 2026 will be its best year ever The Global Box Office, with some 1.4 billion projected.
How will you hit that number? How much do you need the big Hollywood hits to carry the load compared to the local language international blockbusters?

**Rich Gelfond** (4:18)
So we're a portfolio of films. Last year, we did 1.2 billion. In the first half of the year this year, we did about 600 million. And then you fast forward to the second half. So you have Odyssey, which is gonna be one of our biggest movies of all time.
We've got In Select Locations, Spider-Man, we have Dune III, which was filmed with Imax cameras also, by Denis Villeneuve, and that's around Christmas, and tickets have already sold out for that. We have Avengers in certain territories, a new Tom Cruise movie, so we think that goal is attainable.