Cannes Daily: 'Megalopolis' & Lunch with IMAX's CEO
Rich Gelfond has promised Coppola a large-format run as part of his filmmaker-friendly march on box-office market share
Welcome to The Ankler x Screen International Cannes daily. Gregg Kilday and Claire Atkinson are on the ground at the fest for The Ankler, where their reporting will be shared with the best of Screen’s pre-eminent coverage from its newsroom at The Majestic.
“It’s the pictures that got small,” crazy Norma Desmond lamented before she was carted off by the authorities at the end of Sunset Boulevard. Poor Norma! If she’d only been able to hang around for a few more decades, she would have been able to revise her opinion: The pictures are becoming big again — at least when it comes to IMAX large-format screens.
As IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond, accompanied by IMAX global chief sales officer Giovanni Dolci, made his annual visit to Cannes, he was able to treat it as something of a deserved victory lap. The IMAX Corp. was founded way back in 1967, but the past year represented something of a turning point for the company, thanks to the success of Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer followed by Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two.
Although IMAX accounts for less than one percent of the screens worldwide, it pulled in 20 percent of Oppenheimer’s $974 million global box office and 21 percent of Dune’s $708 million total. Stateside, in 2024, IMAX racked up 5.9 percent of the first quarter’s domestic box office, the company’s highest quarterly market share ever in North America. (That said, that is just half of the company’s business, and its technology products and services revenue dipped in the first quarter of this year due to challenges with system renewals.)
IMAX’s success isn’t just because it boasts of bigger screens. It’s also offering filmmakers the equipment to bring the images on those screens fully to life. Oppenheimer was shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, while Dune was shot with IMAX-certified digital cameras.
“We always knew that IMAX was a very valuable proposition to audiences — audiences always came out for IMAX and loved IMAX,” Gelfond tells me during the course of a sun-swept luncheon on the beachside restaurant, La Plage du Festival. “But it took longer than we had hoped for it to spill out in a dramatic way.” Not just exhibitors took notice, but filmmakers too. “Both Chris and Denis were very vocal about the role that IMAX played and that has spread to other filmmakers,” Gelfond adds.
At the moment, for example, Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski is shooting his untitled Formula 1 film, starring Brad Pitt, with IMAX-certified digital cameras. Todd Phillips also shot his upcoming Joker: Folie a Deux with IMAX-certified digital cameras and is planning a select run of the film in 70mm IMAX film.
One perk of filming with IMAX and IMAX-certified equipment, Gelfond reveals, is that the film is then guaranteed at least two weeks in IMAX theaters. In the case of the next Mission: Impossible installment, currently set for May 23, 2025, that movie has already been promised a three-week IMAX run.
Here in Cannes, Gelfond unveiled the company’s 2025 slate of 14 movies filmed for IMAX — more than double the number of any previous years. The schedule kicks off with Disney/Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World on Feb. 15 and also includes Warner’s new Superman movie and Disney’s Tron sequel in addition to the latest Mission: Impossible entry.
IMAX realized during the Covid shutdowns and the subsequent production slowdowns because of the Hollywood strikes that it can’t live by blockbusters — or at least the promise of blockbusters — alone, so it is venturing into other programming, or, as Gelfond puts it, “widening the aperture.” This weekend, it’s playing the filmed-for-IMAX documentary The Blue Angels, about the Navy’s elite Flight Demonstration Squadron, produced by Amazon MGM Studios, which then moves on to Prime Video. It’s also struck a deal with NBCUniversal to air the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics live across IMAX locations nationwide on July 26.
IMAX is not averse to taking risks — or, at least, not as averse as the existing Hollywood studios. To wit: It also has promised Francis Ford Coppola that it will book his Megalopolis even though the movie, which had its world premiere Thursday night in Cannes, has yet to secure an American distributor. The rule-breaking film about the end of the American empire — among many other things — left many viewers puzzled, baffled and challenged, even though a number of critics have risen to its defense. But, says Gelfond, “One of the things we pride ourselves on is being filmmaker friendly, so we committed to Francis to do a global IMAX release.” Now, IMAX just needs an American distributor to step up to the plate.
Claire on the Croisette: Women Lead Amid #MeToo’s Return
Reporting also in Cannes is my colleague Claire Atkinson. Today she tackles the split-screen view of women here as Greta Gerwig, Meryl Streep and Juliette Binoche dominate at the same time the fest releases a hotline for abuse, bars serve Porn Star cocktails, #MeToo allegations and AI porn becomes a topic. Read here.
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Today’s Screen Jury at Cannes
The long-running Screen International Jury Grid is a critical ranking of competition films in Cannes, according to an assembled jury of 12 international film critics, including Screen's reviewers. Today’s latest features Coppola’s Megalopolis as well as Andrea Arnold’s Bird (click on image for the full grid):
