Hollywood seems to have left the draught of the pandemic behind. After quite some time, we’re seeing the Hollywood summer season stacked with potentially big-budget blockbusters in the making offering immense scale through larger-than-life visuals. So heated has the battle become that two of the biggest movies in quite a while are vying for the biggest possible screens – IMAX. And as much as IMAX would love to accommodate both, it doesn’t really have room for it.
In a previous news article, I covered the chief reasons for the conflict between Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and Oppenheimer. After a few days of silence, IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond has weighed in on the dilemma of accommodating both movies. In an interview with Variety, the CEO laments on his conflict, still hopeful to do both movies justice, despite their prior agreements.
I feel sad in a way we can’t accommodate all of them. I know ‘Mission: Impossible’ is going to be a really big movie. Nolan has a special place in Imax’s heart because he uses our cameras and promotes us. It’s not a matter of us saying which we can make more money on. I would hope after ‘Oppenheimer’s’ run, we can bring back ‘Mission.’
The piece spends some time talking about the distribution model of movies, highlighting the differences between how exhibition deals are secured for the more traditional formats like 2D, ScreenX and others, compared to this new breed of large-scale theaters. Premium Large Formats or PLFs as they are called, may be ubiquitous, with one theater having 1-2 such screens on average. But IMAX differs in that it offers its own proprietary format for both the 65mm film to capture movies on, and the giant screens to project them on. Deals are largely made at the studio’s discretion, with IMAX having a lot of say on which movies get to exhibit.
And therein lies the conflict, given that both these movies make strong arguments. Tom Cruise is coming off a homerun with Top Gun: Maverick. The film made over $100 million of its $1.4 billion box office haul from IMAX theaters, so it goes without saying that Dead Reckoning is bound to mint money at the box office. But Universal Pictures as a studio just delivered The Super Mario Bros. Movie which had a great run in theaters too. And Oppenheimer is directed by Christopher Nolan, who is unarguably the biggest proponent and ambassador of the IMAX format, hailing it as the “gold standard” for film projection. Much of the marketing for his movies revolves around the format and promotes it, and Oppenheimer is no exception.
A bigger point of contention is that Universal and Nolan already secured all the screens for IMAX for 3 full weeks, way back when the movie was announced. Contrary to the numerous release date shifts of Mission: Impossible which eventually landed it on the same date, Oppenheimer has always had this one date in mind and stuck to it. So dire is the situation that a third movie, Warner Bros. Barbie, isn’t even being considered for IMAX at all. To that end, IMAX prints for Barbie won’t be available because the Greta Gerwig directed movie won’t be digitally remastered for that format.
While Gelfond didn’t really offer much in terms of how the company deals with conflicts like these, he said they take into account a multitude of factors ranging from the quality of the movie/franchise to their relationships with the directors.
In a situation where there’s an unavoidable conflict, we’ll look at a number of factors: how the franchise has performed before, visuals, and our relationship to the filmmaker.
For what it’s worth, it’s going to be interesting to see how this battle translates to box-office figures. I’ll be covering both these movies so stay tuned to Pop Culture Arena for more.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One hits theaters on July 12, 2023. Oppenheimer releases in theaters on July 21, 2023.
