IMAX alone took a record $1.28 billion in global box office in 2025, up 40% from the year before, and posted its highest-ever share of worldwide box office revenue — about 3.8%, according to the company’s own investor disclosures. That’s a striking number for a single premium format inside a domestic theatrical market that, as this series has documented, is selling nearly half as many total tickets as it did twenty years ago. Premium large-format (PLF) screens — IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and chain-specific equivalents — have gone from a niche upcharge to one of the industry’s few genuinely growing revenue lines, and their rise helps explain how total box office dollars have held up even as overall attendance has fallen.
Small share of screens, outsized share of revenue
Premium formats occupy a small fraction of total U.S. screens — IMAX alone operates a few hundred domestic locations against many thousands of total U.S. screens — but industry reporting has repeatedly shown PLF screens generating attendance and revenue share well out of proportion to their screen count. One exhibitor example cited in trade coverage: premium-large-format screens representing 29% of a chain’s total screens while driving 40% of its total attendance. That imbalance is the core economic logic of the premium-format strategy: rather than try to fill many standard screens at a standard price with a shrinking audience, exhibitors increasingly concentrate investment on fewer, premium screens that charge a meaningfully higher price and draw disproportionate demand from the audience segment still willing to make moviegoing a event-level occasion rather than a routine one.
IMAX’s own numbers tell the story
IMAX’s worldwide box office share has climbed from roughly 3.2% in the pandemic-disrupted 2020-2021 period to 3.8% by 2025 — modest-looking movement in percentage-point terms, but a meaningful gain for a single premium-format provider inside a global box office worth tens of billions of dollars annually. In Q1 2024 specifically, IMAX reported delivering 5.9% of the entire North American domestic box office for that quarter — the company’s highest-ever quarterly market share in the region, and a figure that underscores how concentrated IMAX’s contribution has become around specific high-profile release windows (major tentpole openings, where premium-format tickets are disproportionately purchased) rather than spread evenly across the calendar.
Why this counts as “propping up” rather than “growing” the box office
It’s worth being precise about the distinction this headline draws. Premium formats aren’t adding meaningfully to total admissions — the underlying audience going to any theater has shrunk regardless of format, as documented throughout this series. What premium formats are doing is capturing a larger dollar amount per ticket from a subset of that shrinking audience, which helps the total revenue figure hold up better than admissions alone would suggest, without reflecting any actual growth in how many people are going to the movies. It’s the format-level expression of the same price-over-volume dynamic driving the broader average-ticket-price increase covered elsewhere in this series — concentrated in its most visible, most deliberately marketed form.
The theater-chain arms race
Trade press has documented a competitive dynamic among major exhibitors — described in some coverage as “IMAX envy” — where chains without their own branded premium-large-format offering have increasingly built or licensed proprietary equivalents (branded premium auditoriums with enhanced screens, sound, and seating) specifically to capture the same revenue-per-ticket uplift IMAX and Dolby Cinema have demonstrated. That competitive buildout suggests exhibitors themselves view premium-format expansion as one of the few reliable growth levers available in a shrinking-attendance environment — a strategic bet that the audience willing to pay a real premium for a differentiated theatrical experience is a more defensible, monetizable segment than trying to win back the broader, price-sensitive casual moviegoer covered in this series’ piece on per-capita admissions decline.
The risk in leaning on premium pricing
A strategy built around a smaller audience paying meaningfully more per visit has a structural ceiling: there are only so many moviegoers willing and able to pay a premium-format surcharge on top of an already-inflated base ticket price, and that population is unlikely to be large enough to offset a continued decline in the broader, price-sensitive casual audience if that decline continues. Premium formats have been a genuine bright spot in the data — real, measurable revenue growth in a shrinking-volume environment — but they represent an increasingly concentrated bet on a smaller slice of the population rather than a solution to the broader attendance decline this entire series has documented.
What a premium ticket actually costs relative to standard
Premium-format tickets commonly carry a surcharge in the range of several dollars to $8 or more over a standard evening ticket, depending on market, format, and whether the presentation includes 3D or other add-ons — a markup that, layered on top of an already-risen $11.31 national average ticket price, can put a single premium-format seat comfortably above $18-20 in many markets before concessions. For a family of four, the gap between choosing standard and premium format for a single outing can easily exceed $30 — a real, felt cost difference that plausibly reinforces the broader pattern this series has documented: premium formats capture more revenue from a smaller, more committed audience segment willing to absorb that gap, while a more price-sensitive, casual moviegoer priced out of even the standard ticket has less and less reason to treat a trip to the theater as a routine, low-stakes outing the way they might have in 2005.
Why studios lean into premium formats at release too
The premium-format dynamic isn’t purely an exhibitor-side pricing decision — studios have increasingly built marketing campaigns and even certain visual/technical elements of major tentpole productions specifically around the premium theatrical experience, from IMAX-specific aspect-ratio camera work to marketing materials emphasizing “the way it was meant to be seen” framing that implicitly argues standard-format viewing is a lesser experience. That kind of studio-side promotion reinforces exhibitor pricing power on premium formats by giving audiences a specific, marketed reason to pay the surcharge rather than simply defaulting to whatever showtime is cheapest or most convenient — a mutually reinforcing relationship between studio marketing strategy and exhibitor premium-format pricing that has likely contributed to premium formats’ outsized revenue growth relative to their still-modest share of total U.S. screens.
What we did
IMAX’s 2025 global box office figure ($1.28 billion, up 40% year-over-year) and worldwide box office share figures (3.8% for full-year 2025; 3.9% in 2019; roughly 3.2-3.6% in the years between) come from IMAX Corporation’s public SEC filings and investor/press disclosures as reported in trade coverage (The Hollywood Reporter, CNBC) and the company’s own filings; the year-by-year share figures shown in our second chart are drawn from a combination of these disclosures and general trend reporting rather than a single consolidated IMAX table, and should be read as directionally accurate rather than a precise official annual series. The Q1 2024 domestic share figure (5.9%) comes from IMAX’s own reported results for that quarter. The first chart’s estimated overall PLF (premium large format, including IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and chain-branded equivalents) share of total U.S. box office revenue is explicitly labeled as a USA Times Data Desk illustrative estimate — we did not find a single authoritative aggregate figure combining all PLF formats’ total revenue share by year, so we modeled a plausible growth curve based on IMAX’s own disclosed growth and general industry reporting on PLF expansion; this should not be read as an official industry statistic. The “29% of screens, 40% of attendance” exhibitor example comes from a specific chain (Phoenix Theatres) cited in trade press and is illustrative of the broader dynamic, not a national-average figure. Premium-format ticket surcharge figures (several dollars up to $8 or more over standard pricing) reflect general, widely observed market pricing rather than a specific verified national average we pulled from a pricing database, and should be read as an illustrative range rather than a precise figure.
