Imax CEO Richard Gelfond Brendon Thorne/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Imax is riding high. The cinema technology company reported strong second-quarter financial results Thursday, showing a 139 percent surge in profit as its global box office sales climbed 41 percent, year on year, to $281 million. From films like Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning to Brad Pitt's F1 and Ryan Coogler's Sinners, the key to Hollywood's recent theatrical revival has been big-screen spectacle - and the brand synonymous with the giant theater experience has been reaping the rewards. On just over 400 screens in North America, Imax delivered over 20 percent of the opening weekend box office performance for Sinners, F1 and Final Reckoning. Related Stories Movies Rotterdam Unveils 2025 Hubert Bals Fund Projects Business Imax Quarterly Revenue and Profit Rise Amid Hollywood's Theatrical Comeback A 10 percent slice of gross "used to be the high end of what we delivered on major tentpole releases," Imax CEO Richard Gelfond said on Thursday's earnings call. "Now that's just business as usual." A lesser-discussed driver of Imax's growing global strength, however, sits far afield from the company's core partnerships with the Hollywood studios. In recent years, China and Japan, the world's second- and fourth-biggest box office territories, have seen a marked shift in audience preference towards local filmmaking over imported Hollywood fare. In Japan, where Hollywood has routinely taken at least half of the box office, local Japanese films earned $1.01 billion in 2024 - about 75 percent of the market - while imported titles slumped to $329 million. In China, Hollywood's market share slipped to about 20 percent last year - the lowest in well over a decade. A similar, though less stark, transition has been in evidence throughout Southeast Asia, as well. Imax has stayed a step ahead of this shift by working with foreign studios to bring more local-language filmmaking into the Imax format, while building out its theater network into ever further reaches of the globe. The biggest commercial movies made in China, Japan, India, South Korea - and even Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia or Vietnam - are now often released in Imax. This strategy will be vital to Gelfond's stated target of delivering a record $1.2 billion in global box office in 2025. On Thursday, the CEO revealed that local-language films accounted for approximately 40 percent of Imax's global box office in the first half of 2025, up from about 20 percent in recent years. As Asian ticketbuyers increasingly opt to go local, they're still ending up in Imax theaters. The trend was on full display last weekend, when the anime tentpole Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle shattered Japanese box office records. A sequel to Japan's top-grossing anime feature of all time, Infinity Caste opened to a record $49.4 million, including $3.5 million generated from just 59 Imax screens. Imax has contracts in place for 15 more locations in the country, and says it expects to ink a record number of deals for further installations before the end of the year. Imax is also capitalizing on anime's surging global popularity overseas, with plans to roll out Infinity Castle in more than 40 global territories starting Sept. 12. North America is included, as are key markets across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania. The Hollywood Reporter connected with Gelfond earlier this week to discuss the network effects driving Imax's increasingly diversified global strategy. Let's talk through the drivers of Imax's recent success and strength in Japan. There's been a steady expansion of Imax locations in the market. I understand you have 55 now and 15 more in backlog, and you're expecting to sell a record number of agreements for new theaters in 2025. What's been driving this growth - particularly from the perspective of the Japanese exhibitors who are your partners? I'll try to put it into context. Typically, when you go into a new country, the exhibitors say, "Well, maybe it works in Korea and it works in China, but it won't work here." That's phase one. Then you get your first partner, and the numbers do indeed work. So you go to that partner and say, "You should do more of them." And the partner sort of says, "Well, I have all the time in the world to figure it out when I want to put more in." And then they continue to do well, so they gradually put a couple more [theaters] in. Then their competitors start to notice, so the competitors put a couple locations in too - and they see that it works. Now, you have competition, with your various partners starting to compete to get geographic zones before their competition builds there. We've been in Japan for a long time, so the business is at this state of self-generating inter