"Plenty of room in the market": What’s next for the thriving premium format cinema sector?

In the post-­pandemic exhibition world, big screens — together with the range of other cinema technologies loosely grouped under the ‘premium format’ banner — have become a significantly bigger business.

According to UK analysis and advisory company Omdia, the number of premium format screens around the world increased to 7,830 in 2023, with the count of premium large-format (PLF) screens rising 3% to 5,560. In North America, the PLF count was up 2.5% to 1,585; in Eastern Europe it rose 8.5% to 177; and in Western Europe it jumped 18.5% to 555.

At the box office, premium-format screens, with their higher ticket prices, are accounting for an ever-increasing share of sales. In 2024 they contributed 15.6% of overall North American box office, reports Comscore, compared to 14.5% in 2023 and just 10.3% in pre-pandemic 2019.

No wonder, then, that exhibitors are eager to use premium formats to lure audiences back to the multi­plex. PLF screens are “driving the business so much more in a post-Covid world”, says Brock Bagby, president of US circuit B&B Theatres. “People are seeking them out. If they’re going to get off the couch, they want to see a film on the biggest, best screen possible.”

A handful of global premium formats are currently working to feed that demand. With more than 50% of all global premium locations, Imax remains the market’s biggest player (though the company shuns the ‘PLF’ label for its combination of giant screens with projection and production hardware and software).

Besides a well-known brand, Imax’s selling points include a 90-country global footprint that brings in two-thirds of the company’s revenue from outside the US, and valuable clout with distributors and exhibitors. “If you’re a studio and you want to maximise your box office, you want to leverage off Imax,” asserted CEO Rich Gelfond at a recent conference. “If you’re an exhibitor and you want to bring in incremental revenue and a higher ticket price, you want Imax.”

Brand reputation is likewise an important card for Dolby Cinema, the PLF format launched a decade ago by audio technology giant Dolby that combines the Dolby Vision laser-projection system with Dolby Atmos immersive audio and distinct auditorium entrance and design features.

Dolby Cinema has a smaller footprint — 275-plus locations in 14 countries, including nearly 160 under a currently exclusive deal with AMC in the US — but claims to produce the highest per-screen average box office for a premium format and to have the strongest supply of mainstream feature content (49 of the past five years’ top-50 worldwide hits have been available in the format, the company reports).

The content supply, says Jed Harmsen, Dolby’s head of cinema and group entertainment, “is a big differentiator for us — customers [cinema operators] knowing that there is a really meaningful, robust pipeline of content that will showcase the totality of the technical capabilities.”

PLF rivals

ScreenX is a more-recent PLF entrant using a multi-projection system to extend selected sequences of a film onto the left and right side walls of an auditorium. Offered by CJ 4DPlex, part of the South Korean CJ Group that also includes exhibition and production operations, ScreenX is currently in more than 400 screens worldwide and hopes to expand into “well over” 1,000, says CJ 4DPlex senior vice president of content and production Paul Kim.

In the wider premium format category, CJ 4DPlex also operates 4DX, the ‘multi-sensory’ system that combines motion-based seating with effects simulating scents, lighting and even weather from the on-screen content. 4DX is currently installed in nearly 800 auditoriums, almost a third of them in China, and is offered in combination with ScreenX as Ultra 4DX.

Based in Quebec, Canada, D-Box Technologies has already reached 1,000 screens around the world with its D-Box immersive haptic seating, which produces motion, vibration and texture effects synchronised with the action on an auditorium’s screen.

Company president and CEO Sebastien Mailhot says D-Box is “one of the faster-growing premium offerings” in what he sees as an overall marketplace with plenty of room for growth. “Probably 30% of the screens around the world could become premium offerings in our time,” predicts Mailhot. “So out of the 200,000 screens around the world, the potential is for 60,000 premium screens.”

If that kind of growth materialises, it could attract additional companies into the sector — China’s Cinity system and France’s ICE side-screen format are among the players with growth potential — and lead the premium format business to evolve in unexpected ways.

Up to now, audience interest in premium format screenings has focused mostly on the kind of sci-fi and action films that seem naturally suited to the enhancements on offer. Last February, for example, Dune: Part Two took 44% of its opening weekend gross from premium screens (according to in-theatre measurement firm EntTelligence), and earlier this year Captain America: Brave New World snagged 35% of its opening tally from premium locations. 4DX scored two of its biggest ever opening grosses on consecutive weekends last year with Twisters followed a week later by Deadpool & Wolverine.

But premium format companies report that other genres are now beginning to benefit too. D-Box’s Mailhot says that in 2023 it was Barbie rather than the more obvious Oppenheimer that sold the most D-Box tickets. And currently, he adds, animation and “anything related to music” are notably popular genres.

Local and alternative content is becoming another important category for the premium players. “There’s room to deliver more concert films in these formats, outside of the summer months when we know Hollywood dominates,” says Kim of CJ, which last year produced and released titles such as Blackpink concert feature Born Pink.

Revenue models

How premium formats work with exhibitors and distributors could also evolve as the market grows. Though they decline to reveal specifics, most format operators say they aim to work with all exhibitors in a given market and that their deals with circuits can involve different combinations of upfront payments for equipment installation and revenue-­sharing arrangements. But most insist, too, that their business model is not one-size-fits-all. “We try to work flexibly in understanding what’s going to make our partners successful,” says Dolby’s Harmsen, “where they might be capital-­constrained, where they might not be.”

Format operators say they also deal across the board with studio distributors — and some of the more commercially minded independents — to ensure that most of a given year’s top box-office performers are available in their format.

Relationships between premium formats, distributors and exhibitors could be shaken up, however, by arrangements such as Imax’s recent deal with Netflix to give an exclusive Imax theatrical run around the world to Greta Gerwig’s Narnia feature, scheduled to open in the autumn of 2026.

On a recent earnings call, Imax’s Gelfond admitted that while the big-screen pioneer is “not in a rush” to do another such deal, if the arrangement works “it’s going to be extremely tempting for the talent, it’s going to be tempting for Imax and it’s certainly going to be tempting for Netflix”. Narnia, said Gelfond, is “the kind of movie that’s very conducive to an Imax release. It will create event status around Netflix, and it’s content our exhibitors otherwise wouldn’t have had.”

Room for all

Competition for content could become one factor as premium formats vie with one another for shares of what is expected to be an expanding marketplace.

Global premium format operators mostly agree the marketplace is already big enough for them all to survive. “There’s plenty of room in the market for everybody who’s currently out there,” says CJ’s Kim. “Most of the PLFs whose brand is adopted and well-known by audiences offer something a little bit different.”

Diversity is likely to be fostered by exhibitors who install different premium formats at different venues in their circuits, aiming to give audiences the widest possible choice of options. “For exhibitors in the right locations and with the right audience demographics, it can really work to invest in a variety of these formats,” says Charlotte Jones, senior principal analyst, cinema and movies at Omdia.

For the global players that do survive, the premium format business is likely to offer both growth opportunities and a few challenges going forward.

Growth could come from many corners of the world — according to Omdia, premium format screens currently account for only 3.5% of the overall worldwide screen count — but territories and regions cited by operators as having particular potential include Japan, Southeast Asia, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East and Western Europe. Some European film markets such as Italy and Spain, says Omdia’s Jones, “have been slower to adopt, and we’re seeing an uptick in interest from those exhibitors over the last year or two”.

China, an early adopter of premium formats, could be a major opportunity, though mostly for Imax, which has a commanding position with nearly 800 locations in the territory. After a soft 2024 in the market, Imax reported $43m in box office over the five-day late-­January 2025 Chinese New Year holiday, much of it from local animated smash Ne Zha 2, which became the company’s biggest local-language release ever and biggest release of any kind in China (grossing $152m on Imax in China at press time).

One development that could be both a challenge and an opportunity for the global premium players is the proliferation of so-called exhibitor-­brand PLFs.

In North America, most of the leading cinema circuits now offer their own version of the premium large-format experience alongside their screens equipped with global formats. The biggest North American circuit AMC, for one, recently announced an investment plan that could see its count of branded ‘Prime at AMC’ PLF screens jump from 31 to 100. Worldwide, according to Omdia, the number of exhibitor PLF screens grew by 3.8% in 2023, compared to the 3% growth rate for PLF screens overall.

For the exhibitors, own-brand PLFs are a way to offer a premium-format experience to customers without necessarily having to share revenues. As such, the own-brand screens represent competition for the global format providers; but for some premium format companies they can be new customers, as Cinemark’s XD screens have been for the haptic seating products offered by D-Box.

Responding to this new development in the PLF business, Dolby last year changed its policy in the market to offer the Dolby Vision projection system to exhibitors already employing Dolby Atmos in their own-branded PLF screens (previously only Atmos had been available to exhibitors as a standalone product and the Vision/Atmos pairing only as part of the full Dolby Cinema package).

The move, explains Dolby’s Harmsen, recognised that even with exhibitors opening more of their own premium auditoriums, “there’s still an opportunity to bring just the best picture and the best sound technologies to those rooms”.

“Coming out of the pandemic, we are, as an industry, trying to regrow our box office and regrow our footing collectively,” Harmsen continues. “As a consequence, capital investment is constrained. But irrespective of that, a lot of our exhibition partners have made meaningful investments in their own PLF offerings. So why not be able to work with them to bring the best sight and sound technology to that investment?”

While Dolby is “absolutely as committed to continuing the Dolby Cinema experience as we’ve ever been,” says Harmsen, the new policy is a matter of “meeting the market where it is and being able to help [exhibition partners] drive greater attendance, and ideally increase ticket prices.”

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