China, the big draw for IMAX

IMAX Corp, the Canadian motion-picture film format company, is gearing up to expand in China with more giant-screen theaters and a greater variety of movies, including Aftershock, the first non-English IMAX film.

China is currently the second-largest IMAX market, after the United States, with 23 IMAX cinemas. The company has plans for about 50 IMAX theaters on the mainland by 2012. IMAX and Wanda Cinema Line Corp, one of the fastest growing cinema chains in China, recently announced the addition of three theaters to the cities of Quanzhou, Wuhan and Dalian, which will give Wanda 14 IMAX screens on the mainland by the end of 2012.

"The Chinese film market is in a period of phenomenal growth," said film critic Tan Fei. "Chinese audiences want higher quality in pictures and sound, which can be seen with the popularity of films such as Avatar and Alice in Wonderland. So IMAX's large-format version has become a big draw for many movie operators and movie-goers."

The nation's total box office reached 6.2 billion yuan ($915 million) in 2009, a 43-percent increase from 2008, according to a report in February by EntGroup Inc, a film industry consulting company in China. It estimates that the 2010 box office revenue will reach 10 billion yuan in China with a revenue of 20 billion yuan by the end of 2012.

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