Boxoffice Pro Q1 2021

international release, premium formats
accounted for over a quarter of box
office receipts in some markets, while
Imax’s per-screen average for Tenet’s
opening weekend—representing nearly
250 screens across 38 countries—was
over $20,000. As of December 21, the film
had earned $42 million on Imax screens.
Tenet was followed by fellow Warner
Bros. release Wonder Woman 1984, which
by December 27 had earned $8.2 million
on Imax screens worldwide, making up
nearly a tenth of its overall gross.
With Hollywood tentpoles thin on the
ground since March 2020, PLF providers
have had to look to other programming
categories to fill their screens and give
moviegoers hungry for out-of-home
entertainment a reason to hit up their
local theater. For Imax, the solution has
been local content, with films like The
Eight Hundred and Jiang Ziya: Legend
of Deification (China), Demon Slayer the
Movie: Infinite Train (Japan), and Train
to Busan sequel Peninsula (South Korea)
drawing audiences to Imax screens across
Asia in droves.
By far Imax’s biggest market in 2020
has been China, where a network of
nearly 700 screens saw a gross box office
(GBO) of nearly $80 million from July
up to (but not including) the December
release of Wonder Woman 1984. “Our
success in China in 2020 has more to do
with Chinese local titles” than Hollywood
imports, explains Dehmel. In Japan—
where between July and December
Imax earned a GBO of over $30 million
on 38 screens—the “key driver for our
success” has been Toho/Aniplex’s Demon
Slayer the Movie: Infinite Train, which
in December surpassed 2001’s Spirited
Away as Japan’s highest-grossing title of
all time. Reflecting the earnings power of
local titles in Japan, in November Imax
inked a deal with Toho for a five-film
distribution agreement.
ScreenX—Korea-based cinema
technology company CJ 4DPLEX’s
270-degree panoramic screen offering—
also found success in 2020 despite a lack
of major Hollywood titles. “Box office for
both of our premium formats, ScreenX
and [motion seating technology] 4DX, has
been increasingly steady as markets have
begun to open up,” says CJ 4DPLEX CEO
JongRyul Kim. Over the second half of
2020, “exhibitor partners have started to
embrace more and more ScreenX (and
4DX) as a means of bringing moviegoers
back to cinema, as the experience can’t be
replicated at home or elsewhere.”
As with Imax, East Asia was ScreenX’s
strongest territory in 2020, with China’s
box office having “fully recovered to past
annual averages, while Korea and Japan
have had a steady inflow of audiences” in
the final months of the year, says Kim.
With audiences eager to set foot in
theaters—and big-budget Hollywood
releases decidedly not, at least not
yet—CJ 4DPLEX has had to be flexible
in terms of programming, says Kim. In
collaboration with parent company CJ
CGV and sister company CJ ENM, “We
recognized the skyrocketing demand for
alternative content made specially for
the big screen, and in particular ScreenX.
PLF’S GLOBAL
FOOTPRINT
Imax
1,572
screens worldwide
North America: 420
Greater China: 724
APAC: 122
EMEA: 251
LATAM: 55
Dolby Cinema
450+
locations open or committed
27
exhibitor partners in 14
countries
Dolby Atmos
6,100+
screens open or committed
90+
countries
ScreenX
61
exhibitor partners in 36
countries
351
screens worldwide
U.S./Canada: 56 screens
LATAM: 4 screens
EMEA: 66 screens
Asia/Oceania: 225 screens
Q1 2021
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