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Imax Corp Chief Executive Officer Richard Gelfond. Despite theater closures due tot he state of emergency, he said Imax plans to almost triple its number of cinemas in Japan by 2024, betting on a strong rebound from the coronavirus pandemic in the world’s third-largest movie market by box office.
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These temporary theater closures will not have a material impact on our outlook for the rest of the year or our overall positive momentum in Japan.
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Sven Asai
Quite wrong. The theaters are usually full with seniors, the only age group that still can afford to go often and to buy the sold snacks and drinks. And they’re used to watch movies this way and not by Netflix & Co. streaming. That all won’t change so much in an aging society. Btw., Netflix has already severe problems, so they are soon out of the market with quite a probability. One point is of course right, there are currently not so many good movies out there and probably also not in the pipeline anymore that would be worth the less money available to the average masses to spend for watching at a movie theater.
Kyakusenbi_Arimasu
Bring back drive in theaters. I would even rent a car just to enjoy that nostalgic reality. Even with heavy bad sounding aluminum speakers.
ADK99
@robert maes, your point about the declining population would make sense if the market for Imax theaters was saturated. There are currently only 30-40 of them in the whole country, and they are going to expand to around 100. Or, around 1 theater per million people even using the 2040 population projection.
They don't need an expanding population, they just need people to choose Imax over their competitors. Whether they will prove to be correct or not remains to be seen, but there is no reason for them to put too much weight on the falling population when they have such a low market share (there are over 3,000 screens in Japan)
robert maes
Well mr Gelfond, you are in for a bad surprise and your shareholders for a worse one. I guess your real focus is on the real estate and not the actual movie theater operations. Tell me, in a very very fast shrinking Japan, population and economic wise where do you see increased customers come from ? We go from 123 million now ( + 2 mil foreigners) to 100 million by 2040( not 2050).
japan looses approx 600.000 citizens this year, that will increase.
there are less and less blockbusters to draw them in, Netflix is a serious competitor. Share with me Please the grounds for your enthousiasm