Imax is undergoing a quiet but consequential strategic shift in Asia – and the numbers are beginning to make it unmistakable.
The premium exhibition giant delivered a record $1.28 billion in global box office in 2025, a 40% year-on-year surge, with the Asia-Pacific region alone accounting for roughly half of that total, up nearly 80% year on year. China contributed $407 million to that tally – its best-ever Imax performance, eclipsing the previous record set in 2019 by 5% – while Asia ex-China added a further $230 million, also the highest ever for that grouping. For a company that once relied almost exclusively on China to power its Asian growth story, the spread of records across markets as varied as Japan, India, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam represents a fundamental reorientation.
Giovanni Dolci, Imax’s chief commercial officer, describes the shift plainly. The era of a single market driving the lion’s share of Imax’s theater growth is over – and that, he says, is entirely by design. Speaking to Variety, Dolci noted that when the company signed agreements for around 163 Imax locations in 2025, contributions came in a genuinely balanced way from markets across Asia-Pacific, continental Europe and beyond. Record theater-signing years in both Japan and Australia, new agreements in Germany – long a dormant territory – and multiple deals in France all contributed to what Dolci characterizes as a much more diverse and resilient growth engine.
“Five years ago, if you asked me where Imax’s growth was coming from, the answer was China. Ten years ago, it was North America,” Dolci tells Variety. Now, he says, no single market dominates, and that balance is something the company actively welcomes.
Mainland China, with 797 Imax locations – the largest concentration in the world, representing nearly 44% of the company’s 1,796-strong commercial multiplex network – remains the biggest market and a critical part of the global story. The 2026 Lunar New Year holiday period offered a timely reminder of the market’s enduring power: the seven-day window delivered $28 million in Imax box office, with racing thriller “Pegasus 3” alone grossing $24 million, the strongest Imax performance for a Chinese film since last year’s animated blockbuster “Ne Zha 2.” The Imax China network captured 3.4% of the total holiday box office on less than 1% of screens. “Pegasus 3” also marks Imax’s fourth collaboration with filmmaker Han Han and will receive an exclusive North American Imax run alongside select U.K., Australian and New Zealand locations. The 2025 full year saw Imax’s China market share reach 5.5%, its highest on record.
Yet Dolci is candid that China’s role within the broader Imax narrative has evolved. Growth in the market continues, he says, but at a different pace and with a different emphasis – selectively pursuing the best new multiplex developments in high-tier cities, and increasingly exploring a newer strategy of converting existing cinemas that currently lack an Imax screen. The company struck a deal last year with its top Chinese partner Wanda specifically around that retrofit approach, placing Imax systems in established venues where the performance data justifies the investment.
The local language slate remains a pillar of that effort: since 2020, Imax has released 15 Chinese Filmed for Imax titles – among them “The Eight Hundred,” “The Battle at Lake Changjin,” “The Wandering Earth II,” “Decoded” and “Home Coming” – and more are in the pipeline as release schedules are confirmed. Last year, six of the top-10 Chinese Imax titles were local language productions, and the 2025 Lunar New Year alone saw Imax titles grossing over $180 million in the format’s box office. The financial impact of that shift is visible in the Imax China subsidiary’s Hong Kong-listed results: content solutions revenue – essentially box office-driven income – more than doubled from $15.5 million in 2024 to $33.9 million in 2025, driven in large part by the higher proportion of local language box office, which yields a greater take rate for the group.
If China is the market Imax grew up in, Japan has become the market that best illustrates how its current model works. The country delivered Imax’s highest-ever Japanese box office in 2025 at $90.7 million, beating the previous record by 23%, driven by a content mix that blended Hollywood tentpoles with a robust slate of local language titles. Five of the top-ten Japanese Imax releases last year were local productions, and “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” finished as the fourth highest-grossing Imax title globally in 2025 – a result Dolci describes as something he would not have believed possible a decade ago.
Imax now operates 62 locations in Japan, with 10 new sites opened last year alone, representing a roughly 20% footprint expansion, and agreements signed for a record 13 new and upgraded locations. The critical strategic move has been the push into suburban markets beyond Tokyo and Osaka. Dolci says the company had to first build a diverse enough local language slate to satisfy audiences outside the major metro areas before opening there. That work has paid off: the performance of the suburban openings in 2025 was, in his words, “absolutely stunning.”
A significant milestone is also on the horizon. Imax will release its first-ever Japanese Filmed for Imax title later this year. While the project has not been publicly announced, Dolci describes it as a long-overdue step in cementing the format’s story in a market that has become, in his framing, a poster child for Imax’s virtuous cycle: more locations generate more relevance to local producers and studios, which generates more local content, which in turn draws still more interest in the format.
India represents perhaps the most tantalizing long-term opportunity in Imax’s global portfolio, and also the most structurally constrained. With a population of 1.4 billion but only around 9,000 cinema screens nationally, the market is severely under-screened relative to its size – a stark contrast to China’s approximately 90,000 screens for a comparable population. Imax currently operates 35 locations in India, a network that has grown by roughly 60% over the past five years. The country posted its best-ever Imax box office in 2025 at $25.6 million, up nearly 75% from 2024, across a diverse mix of Hollywood, local and international content. Imax debuted a record 11 Indian language titles in 2025, with “Kantara A Legend: Chapter 1” finishing as the highest-grossing Indian title of the year and ranking among the all-time top 15 Imax releases in the market. International content also had its best year on record in India, with “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” becoming the highest-grossing anime title ever in the country.
The company’s next phase in India involves moving methodically into tier two cities, mirroring the suburban Japan playbook. Imax has historically been anchored by its partnership with PVR Inox, India’s dominant multiplex chain, but Dolci indicates the company is actively broadening its exhibitor base, with new partners Mirage Cinema and Rajhans already on board and more expected. The constraint, Dolci says, is not audience demand – the performance of existing screens more than justifies expansion – but the availability of suitable sites.
On the content side, India is on the cusp of its own Filmed for Imax era. Two upcoming Indian FFI titles have been confirmed: “Ramayana,” an epic production backed by Prime Focus, due around the Diwali festival this autumn, and “Varanasi,” the latest chapter in Imax’s ongoing partnership with filmmaker S.S. Rajamouli. The launch of the “Varanasi” teaser, screened in Imax format before an audience of around 50,000 at a venue in Hyderabad, offered a vivid illustration of the appetite for the format in the market. Dolci adds that further Filmed for Imax conversations are actively underway in India.
Among the most dynamic growth stories in the region are Indonesia and Vietnam, the two Southeast Asian markets that have most convincingly surpassed their pre-pandemic box office levels. In Indonesia, Imax has doubled its network from nine locations in 2022 to 18 today through a landmark deal with Cinema 21, with eight of the contracted 10 new sites already open. The market recorded its best-ever Imax performance in 2025 at over $6.5 million, with the format’s numbers outpacing overall industry trends. Vietnam similarly delivered its best-ever Imax year at $5.8 million, with a Galaxy Cinema location recently added to the network. Notably, 2025 also saw Imax’s first-ever Vietnamese-language titles – “Money Kisses” and “Hijack Siege” – with “God-Given Treasure” recently added to the programming slate. Local language horror content, a genre that resonates strongly with Indonesian audiences, is a focus for potential future Filmed for Imax productions there, with active conversations underway.
Malaysia and Thailand also posted record Imax performances in 2025, at $9.8 million and $8.5 million respectively, with both markets expanding their footprints. Thailand’s “Death Whisperer 3” was a standout local title. Dolci singles out Vietnam and Indonesia as the top priorities in the broader Southeast Asia region.
Australia’s transformation has been among the most dramatic in Imax’s recent history. A little over two years ago, the company had a single operating location in the country – the Imax at the Melbourne museum. Today it has 10, with six of those opening in 2025 alone. The market delivered its best-ever Imax box office at over $12 million, with the slate of openings timed around marquee titles including an “Avatar” release that proved an ideal launch vehicle. Imax has already signed deals for 10 additional Australian locations. Dolci calls the market “enormous runway,” noting that 10 Imax screens for an entire country still benchmarks far below comparable markets.
South Korea remains the one significant market in the Asia-Pacific region where Imax’s performance has not followed the broader upward trend. The country’s overall box office has deteriorated sharply, with average weekly grosses falling to levels that have perplexed exhibitors and analysts alike. Dolci declines to speculate on root causes, but is at pains to note that Imax has proven more resilient than the broader market, holding largely flat while the industry overall has taken a dip. He remains sanguine about the format’s prospects there, pointing to the CGV Yongsan location in Seoul, which consistently ranks among the top five highest-grossing Imax theaters in the world. “If you have a good offering, audiences are still responding in a positive way,” Dolci says.
Underpinning Imax’s multi-market momentum is a deliberate and accelerating shift in its content strategy. The company’s 2025 local language box office reached $405 million worldwide, 66% above the previous full-year record, as titles from Japan, China, India and beyond traveled further than ever before. Imax expects to expand its local language slate to 75 titles in 2026, up from 67 in 2025, reflecting a 24% compound annual growth rate since 2019. Concert films – including releases tied to acts such as the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin – have also expanded the format’s reach. The broader argument, Dolci says, is that the cinema space must continue to reinvent itself to remain relevant to new generations: drawing in someone for a concert film who might not otherwise have gone to the cinema, he reasons, makes it more likely they will return for a feature.
On the production front, the 2026 global slate is headlined by Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” for which Imax built a new generation of film cameras. Dolci confirms the title is expected to play across the large majority of Imax screens worldwide, with the usual caveats around Japan’s historically deferred release windows and China’s standard importation rules. Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Three” is also among the titles shot with Imax film cameras. Imax’s 2026 slate includes more than 12 Filmed for Imax titles.
Imax’s 2026 guidance calls for approximately $1.4 billion in global box office, which would represent another record, alongside 160 to 175 system installations. The company closed 2025 with a record $127 million in operating cash flow and a contracted backlog of 434 systems, more than 200 of which are concentrated across the Asia-Pacific region.
For Dolci, the figure from 2025 that best captures what Imax is becoming is not the global box office record but the balance behind it: a growth story drawing simultaneously from Japan and Indonesia and Australia and France and Germany, from Hollywood blockbusters and Japanese anime and Indian epics alike. “The appetite for Imax,” he says, “is really global.”