June 19, 2024 • 49 mins
Paul and Skip sit down with the IMAX chief to discuss the future of cinema and the biggest blockbusters of today. He reveals how the company brought Taylor Swift's record-breaking 'Era Tour' to the (really) big screen and changed the game for concert films, and also recalls what it felt like to get an Oscars-shout out from Christopher Nolan following the Best Picture win for 'Oppenheimer.' Perhaps most importantly, he weighs in on the best place to sit in an IMAX theater — and his answer may surprise you.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Our Way with yours truly paul Anka and my buddy
Skip Bronson is a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, folks, this
is Paul Anka.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
And my name is Skip Bronson. We've been friends for
decades and we've decided to let you in on our
late night phone calls by starting a new podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
And welcome to Our Way. We'd like you to meet
some real good friends of ours.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Your leaders in entertainment and.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Sports, innovators in business and technology, and even a sitting
president or two.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Join us as we asked the questions they've not been
asked before, Tell it like it is, and even sing
a song or two.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
This is our podcast and we'll be doing it our way.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Avatar was a marriage made in heaven. In twenty ten,
Jim Cameron called me over to the old Spruce Goose
where he was using that facility to make it, and
he showed me like seven minutes of Avatar and the
way it used three D and the way it the
images popped the colors. I actually called my office and
(01:10):
I said, you know, I couldn't have envisioned something looking
this good in our format.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Hello, Hey, hey, Glad I got you. I'm glad I
got me too.
Speaker 5 (01:41):
I was trying to find you earlier. I was going
to have, you know, a little problem. But I missed
one day of talking to you.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Well you got to be able to be conditioned to
miss me for one day, darling. But I was sitting
outside the heats unbelievable.
Speaker 6 (01:54):
Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
I finally got a chance to get outside and sit
in the heat. And I'm working on my Broadway place
and just kind of relaxed after that tour and everything.
Speaker 6 (02:03):
But your buddy's coming in. Huh. Yeah, Rich Gelfon.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
Rich is a good friend, and you know he's the
CEO of IMAX. He knows so much about the movie industry,
not just the display of movies, but he goes right
to the core where he works with producers right from
the beginning. You know, he's not a guy that just
all of a sudden they hand them in the film
say here it is.
Speaker 6 (02:25):
I mean, he's highly involved in fact.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
You know, when Oppenheimer won the Academy Award, Chris Nolan,
the director, you know, gave a shout out to Rich,
which was really cool.
Speaker 6 (02:35):
You know, they're reading up on him. It's quite the
success story. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (02:39):
Well, you know, this whole thing with Imax is it's immersive.
You're not just watching something on a flat screen. It's
all around you. The sound is all around you, you know,
the video is all around you. And there isn't a
bad seat. So like the Bond films for example, you know,
I mean it's not built for romantic comedies, but you
(02:59):
know action films, it's definitely next level.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
Well, the Taylor Swift alone, I mean, yeah, how about
that that eras whoever thought that you could pull that off?
I mean, you know, it was quite amazing.
Speaker 6 (03:12):
I'll have to.
Speaker 5 (03:12):
Tell you when he told mutual friends of ours that
show remain name was because they were wrong and they
won't want to be called out on it. But yeah,
you said he was going to do Taylor Swift's Errors tour,
put it in the Imax theater. There were a lot
of people that said, we do you kidding? People aren't
going to want to do.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
That, and it was a huge Yeah, well, you know
the movie business. I'm going to quote him when I
talked to him, because it lived with me for a while.
But William Goldman, who was the great writers of all time,
you know, his great line was nobody knows here in
Hollywood line was nobody knows, and you know most of
them don't. They just copy each other. And it's not
(03:50):
even a business anymore in the movie business, like American airlines.
Speaker 6 (03:54):
But I have to tell you, you know, we screened
movies at our house.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
Yeah, and now, I mean, the percentage of really good
movies that I would feel comfortable recommending to you or
any other friend is so small, because I mean, we'll
watch ten films, feature films that have just come out
in the theater, and I'm lucky if there are three
out of ten that I could say to you, Hey,
(04:19):
you should really watch this film.
Speaker 6 (04:20):
It's tough, and most of them are just too long.
Speaker 5 (04:24):
I mean, I can't tell how many times we watch
a film in our house and the people will say,
I could have cut a half hour out of that,
and it could have been so much better.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
I think the only film, because I judge a film
by that I look at it. The only film I
couldn't cut a flame out of Raging Bull. Yeah, of course,
that's a char masterpiece, Raging Bull. You know, when you
look back both of us and say, what was the
greatest film you saw, You're gonna waiver. You know, you're
(04:54):
going to go from Lawrence of Arabia to the Godfather
to you know, that's the beauty. And it'll be interesting
to see what his take is on great films because
when you watch them a second and third and fourth time, well,
you discover something new every time you watch it that
you've missed, and.
Speaker 6 (05:15):
You know, the technology is advancing, yeah, so much.
Speaker 5 (05:18):
I mean even the very first time I went to
an Imax theater, I thought it was you know, it
was really cool and it was interesting. But now I
saw one of the films in the Imax theater and
it's just next level. I mean it's like, you know,
like everything else with technology, it just grows. And something
that looked amazing, you know ten years ago, today you
(05:41):
would even pay attention to it. But what they've done
because a lot of these films, don't forget they're being
shot with Imax cameras. They're going to be seen in
conventional theaters, but they're really playing to you know, to
the audience that's going to experience it in an Imax.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
I'm gonna ask them about AI because we all know
it's changing everything. I'm just gonna ask him about AI
and see what his take is.
Speaker 6 (06:04):
Yeah, you're gonna like him.
Speaker 5 (06:05):
He's a good friend, and he's funny, and he's fun
and he's smart and works hard. You know, he's one
of the darlings of CNBC. They love having him on
the squawk Box early in the morning on CNBC. That's
something you would never see, of course, unless you recorded it,
because it's not at a.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
Time that thanks, you'd be surprised what I watch him
when I get up, you're just rolling over it.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Then no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
If I'm rolling over with somebody with me, no no,
I get up.
Speaker 6 (06:35):
You know, I do my homework and my.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Reading, but I get all my creating stuff done till
But you know, a lot of my friends I talked
to them at two three in the morning. Damn this thing.
I talked to sleep when two in the morning. I
talked to the Kimmel's two in the morning. I mean,
there's a lot of people, whether they admit it or not,
they don't go to sleep till two or three in
the morning, and they sleep till eleven because they have
the luxury to do so interesting.
Speaker 6 (06:59):
But I talk myself into that one.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
Yeah, I mean my wife, you know, working at Saturday
Night Life that's a nocturnal environment. You know they start writing,
the writers going in at like eight o'clock at night
and two in the morning. You know, they're sitting around
eat Chinese food, Chinese food at two in the morning
and comparing ideas and notes and whatever. And very often
we'll go to you know, sun up and still be
(07:22):
working there. So that's that's gets ingreened heat. He still
sort of lives actually a New York Times. You know,
we've been out in LA for twenty five years, so
we'll have rich On.
Speaker 6 (07:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
I can't wait till you meet him in person too.
It spends time out here from now and then. He's
the kind of guy you would really enjoy. Yeah, I'll
do that. Okay, take care all sleep while you're deciding
who you're going to talk to it to in the morning,
I'm going to bed.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
Well, I was thinking about you, but I guess that's
not gonna happen.
Speaker 6 (07:53):
I'll talk to them wrong. Take care of it all right, by.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Thanks for doing this, I said. This is fun for
me because whenever we do one of these in Paul
or I have one of our friends. It just makes
it special for Paul, every special for me and having
you as a friend and being on a is great.
I'm happy to do it. But I was just going
to ask you know. I know that when you joined
Imax in nineteen ninety four, there were one hundred and
ten theaters in nineteen countries, and now you've got eighteen
(08:27):
hundred in almost ninety countries, and I just thought maybe
you would talk about how you first got involved with
Imax and then this evolution that's taken place.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
So I bought Imax as part of an LBO group
that I put together in nineteen ninety four. The story
skip is that I screwed up. I had a plan,
which is, well, IMAX does really well and institutions and
the movies do really well, so we'll just put it
in commercial multiplexes and we'll grow it, and what an
(09:00):
easy way to make money and grow the business. Well,
it turned out it was really a chicken and egg issue.
So you couldn't put Imax theaters in commercial multiplexes because
they played documentary movies Bears, Wales and Seals. And you
couldn't make commercial movies because they were in institutions. So
(09:22):
you know, people weren't going to go see Air Force
one at the Natural Museum in New York. So the
thing we really misunderstood was how hard it was going
to be to grow the network. And the other reason
it was going to be really difficult was because it
was a film world, it wasn't a digital world. And
(09:43):
one print of one Imax movie cost thirty thousand, forty
thousand dollars at one theater, and one theater because they
were in institutions, not in multiplexes, cost three or four
maybe more maybe five million to build. So the economic
model to really blow it out was severely flawed. And
(10:07):
we see, you know, oh gee, we just spent one
hundred million dollars buying this thing. You know, what were
you thinking? So we set out over a number of
years to re engineer the model. So we figured out
a way to make a lower cost theater and put
it in a commercial setting in multiplex as a lever
(10:28):
off the infrastructure of the multiplex, and then we use
technology over time to figure out how to go from
analog to digital. So, just to give you in the
same set of facts, one print in one theater now
cost fifty dollars down from thirty to forty thousand, and
putting an IMAX theater in a multiplex now costs I
(10:51):
don't know. We do join ventures, so maybe it costs nothing.
We may partner with somebody to do it. So we
developed a model that was much more workable, and it
kind of chugged along and did okay. The first breakthrough
on the film side was Roy Disney did a film
called Fantasia two thousand in the year two thousand and
(11:12):
Disney released it only in Imax and it was a
huge success, and that spurred a lot of the commercial
exhibitors to build more theaters, and the more theaters created
more demand for movies or others along the way. But
the biggest next one was in twenty ten, Jim Cameron
did Avatar one and at that time we had about
(11:35):
two hundred theaters in the world, and on those two
hundred theaters, Imax did two hundred and fifty million dollars,
so we did over ten percent of the global box
office in like a handful of theaters. So that really
accelerated the growth. Every exhibitor kind of started to look
(11:55):
at it and said, those numbers, I've never seen numbers
like that. We got to get Imax, and then a
lot of the studios said, you know, oh, my god,
those results are incredible. We got to get more imaxes,
so that supercharged our growth and led to where we
are today. In addition to the seventeen hundred plus, we've
got another four hundred and fifty and backlog, which means
(12:18):
they're signed and they're about to roll out.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
It's quite a growth pattern, quite a growth spurt. Paul,
of course, being a music icon, he'd be interested to
hear about what happened when you decided to make a
deal with Taylor Swift to Twitter aristour on IMAX. A
lot of people, even friends of ours, thought you were
nuts when you did that. You know, who's going to
go to a mood theater to watch a film of
(12:41):
Taylor Swift performing. But Paul, especially he and I were
talking about this before, is particularly intrigued by what you
did there.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
So to be clear, we were a part of it,
but the lead was done by AMC Theaters and Taylor
was going to studios and looking for ways to do
the Erros tour, and as studios being studios, you know,
looked at it and said, okay, we'll take you know,
fifty percent of the action roughly, and we'll give fifty
(13:11):
percent of the action to the exhibitor and they could
sell concessions. So AMC went to the Swift family and
you probably know they're a close knit group and they
don't use outside advisors, and said, well, what if the
exhibitors release it and we cut the studios out of
(13:31):
their fifty percent. And it was a new model that
no one had really looked at before. And the person
at AMC Wallly was negotiating with the Swift family called
up me and others and said, would you be in
if you were part of the team that we were
kind of self distributing. So the economics for Taylor Swift
(13:54):
were unlike any economics anyone seen in a movie like that,
and it a lot of traction and became an incredible success,
and Paul, you would find this interesting. We proposed later,
you know, why not release it in China, and you know,
we have a very big presence in China, and the
(14:14):
Swift family kind of at first restrained and said, you know,
who's going to go to a Taylor Swift concert in China?
And we worked I think it was with Ali Baba,
and we helped get the government approvals and we got
it into China and it actually did, you know, much
better than we ever would have thought. And you know
that result in China has led us to where now
(14:37):
we're considering doing a lot of other music things in China.
And since you're interested in music obviously specifically, you know
this year we've done a Queen We took an old
Queen concert forty years old, and we repurposed it and
we released it United States and a few other countries,
and we did five million dollars in one weekend a
(15:00):
forty year old concert. Disney Plus released The Beach Boys,
a documentary and it was premiered in Imax before that.
So Taylor, Swift and Beyonce, I think we're more than
just the concerts themselves, but I think they opened a
whole new area of business for us and Paul, whenever
you're ready, we're ready to go.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Richard. The old great quote of a great writer, William Goldman,
about Hollywood nobody knows anything. Was it hard to break
into the system of studios, directors, theaters that have been
evolving for years? How'd you persuade Hollywood to adapt to
(15:42):
your model?
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Fantastic question. And the answer to the conclusion that I'll
back up is we couldn't, so we changed our model
to plug into the Hollywood model. And it's part of
the the answer the first question Skip asked me so
related to that. My partner at the time went up
to Steven Spielberg and said, would you make a movie
(16:03):
for Imax? And it's probably twenty or twenty five years ago,
and Spielberg said, when you get up to one thousand screens,
you'll give me a phone call. And you know, by
the way, at the time, we laughed, thinking there was
no way we'd ever get to a thousand screens, that
that was not really possible, but we made it just
much more plug and play. So directors weren't going to
(16:27):
film everything with Imax cameras, which you had to do
at that time, so we figured out a way to
convert thirty five millimeter images into Imax cameras. So instead
of having to make one hundred or more million dollar movie,
we could take a Hollywood movie you'll like Avatar or
our first Hollywood movies were really the Matrix ones at
(16:50):
that time, and for not a lot of money converted
into Imax. And again on the theater side, instead of
saying you got to build a separate building and you've
got to hire a separate staff. We figured out how
to fit into the multiplex. Unfortunately I hadn't read that
quote at that time, so I wasted a lot of
time trying to convince them to get into the Imax business.
(17:15):
And it really was a lot of feudal years because
that just was never going to happen. So once we
figured out we had to change our model to get
into their business, that was really the breakthrough point for us.
Can you talk about your involvement in Oppenheimer?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
I can't tell you that. When Chris Nolan got the
Academy Award and he gave you a shout out. I mean,
Edie and I were at home watching the Academy Awards,
it was like unbelievable drew your name into his acceptance speech.
But how did you first get involved in Openhimer, which was,
by any standard, I think the greatest movie of the year,
maybe the greatest movie of a lot of years. But
(17:55):
how did you get involved in that?
Speaker 3 (17:56):
So we've worked with Chris for twenty years, and Emma,
we did all the Dark Knight that trilogy, and we
did Dunkirk, and we did Interstellar and we did you know,
pretty much every big movie he's involved with. Chris is meticulous, demanding,
a genius, and his partners really have to rise to
(18:20):
his level, whether it's talent or technology or whatever his
partner's role is. And we became, you know, very close
as a group, almost you know, seamless in the way
we work together. And then about eighteen months or two
years before the movie came out, I think I was
at Chris's house. He told me about his plans for
(18:42):
the movie and filming it in Imax, and I said, gee,
I'd like to learn more about it. So he said,
here's this book to order, American Prometheus. And he said,
you know, read this book and then come back and
talk to me. So I didn't know when I said
sure that the book was like six hundred pages with
eight hundred footnotes. So I spent my summer reading that book.
(19:06):
The book was fantastic, it was amazing. And went back
and discussed the story and discussed, you know, how he
was going to shoot it and how we could be helpful.
And you know, he's always incredibly innovative. So in Tenant,
for example, he used the camera backwards to capture certain scenes,
(19:27):
and in Oppenheimer, he was going to use big black
and white sequences to capture images, which, if you remember, Skip,
that's a lot of the trajectory of the movie. So
there was no such thing as black and white Imax
film stock. So with Nolan and his team and with
(19:48):
Kodak and our team, we proceeded to try and figure
out how to invent that, and once it was invented,
you know, how to use it, how to develop it.
Chris shot a lot of the movie with Imax cameras,
ones that we had, you know, invented and keep maintaining
and keep working with him and his team on different
(20:09):
lenses and different parts. You know, a team from Imax,
David and Patricia Keely, who run our quality control, were
embedded in the production while he was shooting it for
a long time. And then we're also involved in the
post production of it. We were involved in the dating
of it, and you might remember Skip that it was
(20:31):
dated very close to Mission Impossible seven and Tom Cruise
wasn't very happy that he was losing the Imax network
to Chris's movie, and we were a lot under a
lot of pressure, not only from Tom and Paramount, but
from a lot of exhibitors in the world kind of
our partners saying, how could you possibly pull mission off
(20:53):
the screen? You know Froppenheimer, And again, having worked with
the Nolans for such a long period of time, you know,
we had all the faith in the world that Oppenheimer
was going to be a lot more than a docudrama
about a physicist, and as you know, it was, so
we steadfastly supported the film and Chris and Emma we
(21:16):
wouldn't get muscled out of it. We always have loyalty
to our filmmakers, but we certainly have particularly loyalty to
them and took a lot of heat for it. So
I think we get involved very early. So I think,
you know, the shout out had to do with a
lot of loyalty over a long period of time and
(21:39):
not a lot of collaboration, which helped the film and
definitely raised our game.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Sure, what factors do you attribute to people going back
to theaters?
Speaker 3 (22:08):
You know, maybe Paul not being a little glib, but
I think they never wanted to leave the theaters, and
I never believed that they were going to leave. I
think when the pandemic happened, people didn't go to theaters,
but they couldn't leave their homes. And I think the
streaming industry and Wall Street really hopped on that narrative.
(22:28):
And what they said was people are never going to
go back to movies. And you had, you know, certain
studios at that time, the most well known was Warners,
which you know, said the narrative, why don't we give
you the content on streaming so you don't have to
go to theaters? And you know, I think a lot
of the streaming services, including Netflix, really benefited from the
(22:52):
narrative that people were never going to go back to
the movies and they were always going to watch on streaming.
And I think there was a lot of self interest.
And by the way, it really pissed me off because
you know, movies have been around for one hundred years
and people forgot to say they weren't going because they
were locked in their homes. Now, you know, the narrative was,
(23:14):
you know, why go to a movie when you could
see it in your home. But there's also a narrative,
why go to a restaurant when you have a kitchen
in your home? Because it's an entirely different experience. It's
a communal experience. I mean, why see Paul Anka in
concert if you can put a record on and listen
to it, because it's just a totally different thing. It's
(23:37):
a social experience, and I think self interested people really
leaned into a narrative that was never true. And when
you know, the pandemic lifted and when there was content available,
people went back to the movies because they liked movies,
and they didn't start watching on their television shows. And
(23:58):
I also think the way that movies are released is
very different than streaming. So, you know, streaming, the creative
process is different, the standards are different, the actors are different.
They're just not the same animal. And I think during
a period when people had no choice, they watched them
(24:20):
in their living room. The other thing was the sequence
of watching. So we just saw actually a really good
streaming movie starring Glenn Powell, Hitman, and you know, my
wife turned to me and she said, you know, God,
we should have watched that in a movie theater, because
you know, we stopped when we had to go to
(24:40):
the bathroom. We stopped. We wanted to get a glass
of water. We watched half of it one day and
we watched half of it another day. We still really
enjoyed it, but it wasn't like watching it in a
movie theater. It wasn't nearly as satisfying. And I still
think there's a little bit of a tail on it
because of the strike last year. So there's less content
(25:02):
right now than quote unquote normal. But I think as
the world returns to normal, the level of movie going
will return to normal. Now I need to remind you
guys that IMAX is a lot different than a movie theater,
and because it creates such a special experience and such
(25:23):
a premium experience. And you know, we don't just play movies.
We play documentaries, we play music, we play sports events,
a lot of different things. And I think as the
pandemic has ended, people really want to get out of
their homes and they really want to see things in premium.
So concerts is a great example. You know, the businesses
(25:45):
come back in a really big way, and sports people
want to see them in a very premium way, and
they're paying more and coming back more. And I think
as we get to twenty five and twenty six and
look at what the content is going forward, more and
more people are going to come back. And for IMAX,
(26:06):
our twenty nineteen was our best year ever. And the
best year for the movie business, and in twenty twenty
three our box office was very similar because I think
for special things that want to be cultural events, people
want to go see them out of their home. They
want to see them with their friends, and they want
(26:27):
to cheer with everyone else sitting next to them. So
you know, I think they're not only going to come back,
but be better than ever on a global scale.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
So our resident movie expert is our producer Jordan, who
has been witness from day one. He was really excited
that he was going to get to see you and
listen to you. So, Jordan, did you have a question
for Rich?
Speaker 7 (26:49):
Yeah, I am so thrilled to talk to you. I'm
a former film student and I graduated NYU around the
time Avatar was in theaters, and it was so thrilling
to watch this metamorphosis in how we see movie. I
remember I had a professor to describe it as you know,
almost like being around when we first got talkies in movies,
which I think isn't far off. Christopher Nolan has arguably
(27:10):
been the highest profile champion for the IMAX film format
in recent years. Who do you see are the new
directors who are taking up that mantle.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Earlier this year we released Dune, which was shot in
Imax by Denis Villeneu, and again the results were spectacular.
On only eight tens of one percent of the world screens,
we did twenty percent of the Dune box office, and
it was kind of like appointment viewing, meaning a lot
(27:39):
of movies they do these big numbers on opening weekend
and then they trail off over a period of time,
But for Dune in Imax, it continued to sell out
for weeks and months, so he's certainly a big proponent.
Krie Fuganaka shot one of the Bond movies with Imax cameras,
(28:01):
and you know, he said to me, once you've frowned
first class, you don't like going back to the coach
section anymore. JJ Abrams is working on a project right
now in Imax. Marvel is working on two or three
movies shot in Imax. Paul Thomas Anderson you must be
(28:21):
a fan giving you a love for film, is doing
a movie next year starring Leonardo DiCaprio that he's shooting
in Imax. Ryan Coogler, who did Black Panther, is now
shooting a film with Imax. Film cameras. Warner Brothers and
James Gunn are doing the Next Superman with Imax cameras.
(28:43):
Chuck Roven is doing the movie Mercy with Imax cameras.
Chris mcquarie is filming the Next Mission Impossible. Eighth. So,
the success of Oppenheimer and Dune at the box office
combined with the way filmmakers love the way it looks
and they love the experience, the sound, the big screen,
(29:06):
the resolution, the brightness, how black the blacks are. All
of that, you know, make people really want to get
further involved in IMAX, and I think it becomes self fulfilling,
where you know, the more movies that are shot that
way and shown that way, the more people are going
to be exposed to them, and the more that happens,
the more they're going to want to do it. And
(29:28):
bigger box office means studios want to get on board.
And I'd say right now there are probably more filmmakers
who want to shoot in imax than there are available slots.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Richard, is there a dream project that you've been trying
to get off the ground personally?
Speaker 3 (29:45):
There are a lot of them. I mean, Avatar was
a marriage made in heaven when I was in twenty ten,
which is fourteen years ago. Jim Cameron called me over
to the old Spruce Goose in la where he was
using that facility to make it, and he pulled out
like one of those projectors you have in your house
(30:05):
to look at movies of your kids, and he put
up a little kind of like a home style projector,
and he showed me like seven minutes of Avatar, and
the way it used three D and the way it
the images popped, the color is the whole thing. I
actually called my office and I said, you know, I
(30:27):
couldn't have envisioned it something looking this good in our format,
and it really did so. And by the way, the
second Avatar did over two billion dollars and also did
two hundred and fifty million dollars in imax. You know,
Paull experiential things for me. So we just did the
NBA Finals and we released them in Hong Kong and
(30:51):
Taiwan at seven thirty in the morning, and they looked
so amazing. In imax. We like to use the words
awe inspiring, so I think of awe inspiring experiences. Some
of my favorites. We did the Rolling Stones at Wembley
filmed it in Imax, and when it first came out,
people were standing on their chairs with lighters lit because
(31:13):
it was like you were very much there. One of
my favorites is we took Imax cameras to the top
of Mount Everest and at the time that John Krakauer
wrote the book about the tragedy there, and you know,
when you go into an Imax theater and you see that,
it's incredible. I can't answer it by saying there's one.
(31:34):
But we do use like awe inspiring as kind of
the test run of which we decide whether we want
to do something or not. And literally today I was
meeting with my head of documentaries and my first question
to him when he pitches ideas, I said, is it
an Imax experience? And that's kind of our standard because
(31:55):
I have no interest in doing my dinner with Andre
or doing sideways. You know the Paul Giamatti movie where
two people drank wine on a sidewalk. Iman I passed.
Not that it's not a good movie, but it's just
not an Imax movie. So it's got to be something
that really clicks. You could experience it and we could
take you somewhere, so you know, I don't know if
(32:17):
you've got a chance to see them, but we made
I think it's seven or eight movies from space. We
put our cameras in the Space Shuttle. We put our
cameras in the International Space Station, and a lot of
the astronauts became astronauts because they saw those movies. It
was transporting. It made them feel like they were there.
(32:40):
You know, that's a list of the kinds of experiences
that we like doing.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
You know, Richard, I lived in England and I was
there in the early sixties when the British kind of
caught onto what we were doing and did it better.
And a young kid wound up in a club around
this corner from my hotel. His name was Jimmy Hendrix,
and he changed everything. And you've got a picture behind
(33:05):
you of Mick Jagger and Jimmy Hendrix. What's the significance
of that for you?
Speaker 3 (33:11):
Well, I went to Electric Ladies Studios, which is, as
you know, in New York, the place that he used
to record. And I love music, and there was a
group of people there that where we were. They were
building a special theater in Canada, and they were talking
to us about doing Imax, and they invited me there
(33:33):
so I could capture the spirit of Hendrix and having
done actually we did two movies with Mick Jagger. We
did another one with Martin Scorsese as well as the
one we did at Wembley Stadium, and as I said,
really some of my favorite stuff done. And one of
the people there was an expert photographer and he had
(33:56):
this picture and I asked him if I could have it,
as I thought it really symbolized some of our aspirations
in terms of brilliant image quality, sound, transporting people. Certainly
both the Stones and Jimmy transported people to different places,
(34:16):
so it was symbolic for me. You can't see my
other wall, Paul, but there I have an old black
and white photo of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, the
real ones in like an intense meeting about probably the
future of science. So that just opposes itself. And then
I should tell you about a small one you can't
(34:37):
see right behind me, which is of John Lennon and
Yoko Ono with a woman named Tony Myers. And Tony
Myers is a former colleague of mine who unfortunately passed away,
and she filmed those space movies, and she filmed the
Stones movie. So those are my three photos and why
(34:58):
they all inter relate.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
I'm glad you love music.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Yeah, you know, not to give him a plug because
he doesn't need it. But I first saw Paul in
concert forty years ago, and I went again recently when
he performed here in LA. It's better than it was
forty years ago.
Speaker 6 (35:15):
Show.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
It's just it's off the hook. It's so good. It
would look great in imax. The sound. I mean, it's
all about the music, of course.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
So Paul, we have the ability to do live concerts.
In the last few years, we wired about two hundred
and fifty theaters around the world, mostly in New York
and mostly in the United States. Sorry, I'm confusing New
York and the United States. I know you guys are
in LA. I apologize, But we've experimented with a bunch
(35:43):
of live concerts. People were going crazy because, as you know,
at a concert today, it's a lot of big, you know,
lit up led screens and other screens. You can't see
that well. Obviously, we have great seats, you can We're
a better auditory. But when people saw it in imax,
they kind of flipped out. We did a Brandy Carlisle
(36:06):
event which was I'm very successful live. We did Andre
three thousand. So when you're ready to talk about it, Paul,
we could see if it works.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Oh, come at you skip an eye together?
Speaker 3 (36:18):
Is skip putting up the money?
Speaker 1 (36:20):
You know he isn't listen. You know we're at the age.
We're at the ages now, Richard, where we only signed
the back of checks.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
We don't sign the front of checks. We signed the
backup checks. So rich How's going to ask you a
(36:51):
sort of a funny question. But when you walk into an
empty IMAX theater, where would you sit? What's the ideal
spot if you had to sit in one spot in
the field.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Probably three rows from the back, skip in the middle,
But it depends on the theater. By the way, this
is off point, but you'll find it interesting. One of
the best IMAX experience I've ever had is we did
a three D movie from Space and we showed it
in one of our theaters in Shanghai to a bunch
(37:22):
of kids. And obviously they'd never been to space, they'd
never seen three D. And to watch those kids kind
of freak out and reach for the floating things and
you know, laugh and go crazy was an amazingly inspiring experience.
And you know, I guess it is part of your question.
It didn't matter where they sat, you know, every seat
(37:44):
was better than they could experience a lot of things
in life. But you know, as I said in the
beginning towards the.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Back, you have your private theater here in LA and
you arranged for Ead and I and some friends to
go and see a James Bond movie there. And I
was surprised. Actually three or four of the people had
never been in an imax. They were like, you know,
you've referred to these kids, they've never seen anything like
it before. The reaction was amazing. But I was going
(38:10):
to say to you, Oppenheimer is such a special movie.
It's such an incredible film at a time when you know,
we have a screening room at our house and to
find a good movie to watch is very challenging these days.
I mean, we'll get six different films over six weeks,
and frankly, five of them aren't really worth watching. But
(38:32):
Oppenheimer was such an special experience. I found that it
was better the second time I saw it.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, most great movies, you can watch them three or
four times and pick up on things that you never
picked up initially.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Well, one of the things about IMAX also is it
such a large experience. Your eye could shop the screen.
So you know, usually in us at home or in
a smaller auditorium, you know, you're I goes with the
director sent you, so that's what you see. But in
an IMAX, your eye looks all around. And I saw
(39:08):
Oppenheimer three times in Imax, and I was amazed the
third time at how much I had picked up. You
know that I couldn't pick up and skip. I've tried
telling you many times to throw out that screening room
and go to Imax theaters because it's just not as good.
That's why you don't like the movies as much.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Well, the content of some of the movies lately is
just not really up to par. But do me favorite,
because we don't have a lot of time left, just
explain a typical day for rich Galfond, Like what time
you get up, what do you do first, where do
you go first, where do you spend most of your day,
When do you finish your day? Just give us a
sense of what it's like.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Sure, I get up around six thirty in the morning,
I go to my gym and I work out for
about forty five minutes, watching the business news shows, and
read both my emails and kind of the newspapers for
a couple hours. I leave for the office around nine.
And then you know, when I get to the office,
(40:12):
I'm a walker by management style. I'm skips So I
like walking around and seeing my reports and finding out
what's going on because I find, you know, you get
the best ideas from interacting with your colleagues. And then
I'd say probably about a third of the day is
spent on phone calls or meetings with my colleagues. And
(40:34):
you know, there's people who run like our theater business,
parts of our film business. Since we're so global and
have such a big footprint around the world, I'll almost
every day talk to someone part of my team in
London or part of our team in China, and you
know about what's coming up, what the problems are there
where we go. Then probably a third of the time
(40:57):
is externally focused on a combination of investor issues, public
relations issues, filmmaker issues. And lately I've been spending a
lot more of my time on content. So what's in
the pipeline, what are the ideas, what are the budgets?
And then probably the rest of the time is combined
(41:18):
with thinking about strategy and what we should be doing.
I mean, if I think, if you're good CEO, you
always think about strategy in terms of the little issues
and how they relate to the bigger issues. But I
do think, especially in the entertainment business now, and you
know we've hit on a little of this, but you know,
how do you compete with streaming? How do you make
(41:40):
sure you're global? You know, how do you deal with
the issues facing the disneys and the warners and the paramounts,
you know, And then probably spend another brief period of
time with our mutual friend Alan Grubman, who tries to
tell me how to do my job better than I do.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Dear Allen, Hey, Richard, I want to ask you a
question that AI is obviously changing the world and continue
it's probably in the second inning. The music business is
already feeling it. What's your take on AI and the
film business?
Speaker 3 (42:16):
That is, you know, the most timely question. Certainly, I've
spent so much more time learning about AI than I
ever thought I would. In the last six to eight months,
and I think it's going to happen a lot faster
than everyone thinks, even though they think it's going to
happen fast. I think it's going to happen faster, and
(42:37):
I think it's going to be more revolutionary then people
think it's kind of going to be like the Internet
changed the world. I was at a conference with one
of the senior people at Navidio and he said, it's
going to happen ten times faster than you think. And
I think in the movie business, it's going to happen
in two big buckets. One, the less obvious one is
(43:00):
going to be to the business of Hollywood. So the
cost of special effects is going to go down. You're
going to be able to make special effects a lot
better and a lot cheaper and a lot faster. I
think your business process is going to change. You're going
to be able to use a storyboarding for your movies,
which you know take a long time. You'll be able
(43:22):
to do them really quickly, much less expensively. And then
I think distribution, so things in post production today like
w your movies into different languages. You're gonna be able
to use AI to do that. You know, programming show times,
all kinds of things. And then the other half is
(43:44):
on the content side that's probably going to be a
little bit slower, but it's the sexier one and that's
what people are talking about. I sat next to a
director recently who is working with one of these companies
about text to video, and he gave me, like sitting
at a dinner table, a demonstration of what you could do,
(44:05):
and it was profound. And I know people are really
focused on loss of jobs and things like that, but
you know, I believe like other technoques, like when the
car came around, you know, people were focused on the
loss of jobs in the horse and buggy business. But
I think it's going to be the democratization of content.
(44:28):
I think there's going to be so many barriers to
people other than studios making content and indie people, and
I think it's going to knock down a lot of walls,
and I think it's going to open so much opportunity.
And by the way, not just on the creative side
and making movies, but right now you you know, you
(44:49):
and I can't go in to the special effects business
because the barriers are too high. But I think with
AI it's going to you know, open a lot of
opportunities for a lot of people people, So, you know,
I think we obviously have to be careful on how
we roll it out, and at IMAX, we're looking at
different applications and one of the first places we went
(45:12):
was our legal department to make sure that, you know,
you don't create something that you can't ultimately control where
the data goes and what data goes there. But you
have to be really thoughtful about it. But I think
if you're thoughtful about it, there are just amazing opportunities.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
So the fear is not AI itself, it's the person
that's using it.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
It is and that's one Paul that you know, it
even scares me a little. I haven't I don't have
an answer to that. People a lot smarter than I
am and people more experienced don't have an answer to that.
But I think it's a real challenge. I don't think
it's a, you know, a one year challenge. I think
it's probably more of a you know, I was going
(45:58):
to say five years, but maybe three a five year challenge,
and we definitely have to be in front of that.
And I think there definitely needs to be some government
regulation of it to make sure that doesn't happen too quickly,
and I think that the focus on it is none
too soon.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
I agree, Jordan, We've got to wrap fairly quickly. But
did you have another question you want to ask Rich?
Speaker 7 (46:23):
I mean, this is probably an unfair question, but of
all the projects you have in the pipeline, is there
one that you're most excited about?
Speaker 3 (46:30):
Well, I'll just talk about one that I'm very excited
about that Apple is doing and we're distributing. But it's
Joe Kazinski who did I'm Top Gun Maverick. He was
the director. He's doing a movie on Formula One starring
Brad Pitt, and you see even you're excited about it.
And I've only seen, you know, a couple minutes of it,
(46:53):
but some of the expertise that came from making Top
Gun Maverick in Imax and how it was and the
story to the extent I know about it is exciting.
And obviously F one has so many fans all over
the world, and we have this global network and they're
leaning in I. You know, there are others that you know,
(47:15):
may have equal box office potential and financial but I'm
just really excited as a movie fan to see it.
Speaker 7 (47:22):
Oh, I can't wait to check that out.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
I'm so excited.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
I know you had a window here that you carved
out for us, which I really appreciate. I know you've
got it to get on to another meeting, but Paul
and I greatly appreciate you taking the time to do this.
You're so knowledgeable about not just the technical aspect of it,
but even the roots of films and why they work
and why they don't work. And I just was excited
(47:45):
about getting you on today, so we really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Well, Thanksgip and thanks Paul very much. Enjoyed doing it.
And we'll see you at the Imax movie. Skip not
your screening room.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Okay, you got it.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Nice to meet you, Richard, look to sing in future.
Speaker 3 (48:01):
Take care, Nice to take care.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
See you by.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
Our away with Paul, Anka and Skip. Bronson is a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
The show's executive producer is Jordan Runtogg, with supervising producer
and editor Marcy Depina.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
It was engineered by Todd Carlin and Graham Gibson, mixed
and mastered by the wonderful Mary Do.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Found politic
Our Way with yours truly paul Anka and my buddy
Skip Bronson is a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, folks, this
is Paul Anka.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
And my name is Skip Bronson. We've been friends for
decades and we've decided to let you in on our
late night phone calls by starting a new podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
And welcome to Our Way. We'd like you to meet
some real good friends of ours.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Your leaders in entertainment and.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Sports, innovators in business and technology, and even a sitting
president or two.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Join us as we asked the questions they've not been
asked before, Tell it like it is, and even sing
a song or two.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
This is our podcast and we'll be doing it our way.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Avatar was a marriage made in heaven. In twenty ten,
Jim Cameron called me over to the old Spruce Goose
where he was using that facility to make it, and
he showed me like seven minutes of Avatar and the
way it used three D and the way it the
images popped the colors. I actually called my office and
(01:10):
I said, you know, I couldn't have envisioned something looking
this good in our format.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Hello, Hey, hey, Glad I got you. I'm glad I
got me too.
Speaker 5 (01:41):
I was trying to find you earlier. I was going
to have, you know, a little problem. But I missed
one day of talking to you.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Well you got to be able to be conditioned to
miss me for one day, darling. But I was sitting
outside the heats unbelievable.
Speaker 6 (01:54):
Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
I finally got a chance to get outside and sit
in the heat. And I'm working on my Broadway place
and just kind of relaxed after that tour and everything.
Speaker 6 (02:03):
But your buddy's coming in. Huh. Yeah, Rich Gelfon.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
Rich is a good friend, and you know he's the
CEO of IMAX. He knows so much about the movie industry,
not just the display of movies, but he goes right
to the core where he works with producers right from
the beginning. You know, he's not a guy that just
all of a sudden they hand them in the film
say here it is.
Speaker 6 (02:25):
I mean, he's highly involved in fact.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
You know, when Oppenheimer won the Academy Award, Chris Nolan,
the director, you know, gave a shout out to Rich,
which was really cool.
Speaker 6 (02:35):
You know, they're reading up on him. It's quite the
success story. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (02:39):
Well, you know, this whole thing with Imax is it's immersive.
You're not just watching something on a flat screen. It's
all around you. The sound is all around you, you know,
the video is all around you. And there isn't a
bad seat. So like the Bond films for example, you know,
I mean it's not built for romantic comedies, but you
(02:59):
know action films, it's definitely next level.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
Well, the Taylor Swift alone, I mean, yeah, how about
that that eras whoever thought that you could pull that off?
I mean, you know, it was quite amazing.
Speaker 6 (03:12):
I'll have to.
Speaker 5 (03:12):
Tell you when he told mutual friends of ours that
show remain name was because they were wrong and they
won't want to be called out on it. But yeah,
you said he was going to do Taylor Swift's Errors tour,
put it in the Imax theater. There were a lot
of people that said, we do you kidding? People aren't
going to want to do.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
That, and it was a huge Yeah, well, you know
the movie business. I'm going to quote him when I
talked to him, because it lived with me for a while.
But William Goldman, who was the great writers of all time,
you know, his great line was nobody knows here in
Hollywood line was nobody knows, and you know most of
them don't. They just copy each other. And it's not
(03:50):
even a business anymore in the movie business, like American airlines.
Speaker 6 (03:54):
But I have to tell you, you know, we screened
movies at our house.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
Yeah, and now, I mean, the percentage of really good
movies that I would feel comfortable recommending to you or
any other friend is so small, because I mean, we'll
watch ten films, feature films that have just come out
in the theater, and I'm lucky if there are three
out of ten that I could say to you, Hey,
(04:19):
you should really watch this film.
Speaker 6 (04:20):
It's tough, and most of them are just too long.
Speaker 5 (04:24):
I mean, I can't tell how many times we watch
a film in our house and the people will say,
I could have cut a half hour out of that,
and it could have been so much better.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
I think the only film, because I judge a film
by that I look at it. The only film I
couldn't cut a flame out of Raging Bull. Yeah, of course,
that's a char masterpiece, Raging Bull. You know, when you
look back both of us and say, what was the
greatest film you saw, You're gonna waiver. You know, you're
(04:54):
going to go from Lawrence of Arabia to the Godfather
to you know, that's the beauty. And it'll be interesting
to see what his take is on great films because
when you watch them a second and third and fourth time, well,
you discover something new every time you watch it that
you've missed, and.
Speaker 6 (05:15):
You know, the technology is advancing, yeah, so much.
Speaker 5 (05:18):
I mean even the very first time I went to
an Imax theater, I thought it was you know, it
was really cool and it was interesting. But now I
saw one of the films in the Imax theater and
it's just next level. I mean it's like, you know,
like everything else with technology, it just grows. And something
that looked amazing, you know ten years ago, today you
(05:41):
would even pay attention to it. But what they've done
because a lot of these films, don't forget they're being
shot with Imax cameras. They're going to be seen in
conventional theaters, but they're really playing to you know, to
the audience that's going to experience it in an Imax.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
I'm gonna ask them about AI because we all know
it's changing everything. I'm just gonna ask him about AI
and see what his take is.
Speaker 6 (06:04):
Yeah, you're gonna like him.
Speaker 5 (06:05):
He's a good friend, and he's funny, and he's fun
and he's smart and works hard. You know, he's one
of the darlings of CNBC. They love having him on
the squawk Box early in the morning on CNBC. That's
something you would never see, of course, unless you recorded it,
because it's not at a.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
Time that thanks, you'd be surprised what I watch him
when I get up, you're just rolling over it.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Then no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
If I'm rolling over with somebody with me, no no,
I get up.
Speaker 6 (06:35):
You know, I do my homework and my.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Reading, but I get all my creating stuff done till
But you know, a lot of my friends I talked
to them at two three in the morning. Damn this thing.
I talked to sleep when two in the morning. I
talked to the Kimmel's two in the morning. I mean,
there's a lot of people, whether they admit it or not,
they don't go to sleep till two or three in
the morning, and they sleep till eleven because they have
the luxury to do so interesting.
Speaker 6 (06:59):
But I talk myself into that one.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
Yeah, I mean my wife, you know, working at Saturday
Night Life that's a nocturnal environment. You know they start writing,
the writers going in at like eight o'clock at night
and two in the morning. You know, they're sitting around
eat Chinese food, Chinese food at two in the morning
and comparing ideas and notes and whatever. And very often
we'll go to you know, sun up and still be
(07:22):
working there. So that's that's gets ingreened heat. He still
sort of lives actually a New York Times. You know,
we've been out in LA for twenty five years, so
we'll have rich On.
Speaker 6 (07:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
I can't wait till you meet him in person too.
It spends time out here from now and then. He's
the kind of guy you would really enjoy. Yeah, I'll
do that. Okay, take care all sleep while you're deciding
who you're going to talk to it to in the morning,
I'm going to bed.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
Well, I was thinking about you, but I guess that's
not gonna happen.
Speaker 6 (07:53):
I'll talk to them wrong. Take care of it all right, by.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Thanks for doing this, I said. This is fun for
me because whenever we do one of these in Paul
or I have one of our friends. It just makes
it special for Paul, every special for me and having
you as a friend and being on a is great.
I'm happy to do it. But I was just going
to ask you know. I know that when you joined
Imax in nineteen ninety four, there were one hundred and
ten theaters in nineteen countries, and now you've got eighteen
(08:27):
hundred in almost ninety countries, and I just thought maybe
you would talk about how you first got involved with
Imax and then this evolution that's taken place.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
So I bought Imax as part of an LBO group
that I put together in nineteen ninety four. The story
skip is that I screwed up. I had a plan,
which is, well, IMAX does really well and institutions and
the movies do really well, so we'll just put it
in commercial multiplexes and we'll grow it, and what an
(09:00):
easy way to make money and grow the business. Well,
it turned out it was really a chicken and egg issue.
So you couldn't put Imax theaters in commercial multiplexes because
they played documentary movies Bears, Wales and Seals. And you
couldn't make commercial movies because they were in institutions. So
(09:22):
you know, people weren't going to go see Air Force
one at the Natural Museum in New York. So the
thing we really misunderstood was how hard it was going
to be to grow the network. And the other reason
it was going to be really difficult was because it
was a film world, it wasn't a digital world. And
(09:43):
one print of one Imax movie cost thirty thousand, forty
thousand dollars at one theater, and one theater because they
were in institutions, not in multiplexes, cost three or four
maybe more maybe five million to build. So the economic
model to really blow it out was severely flawed. And
(10:07):
we see, you know, oh gee, we just spent one
hundred million dollars buying this thing. You know, what were
you thinking? So we set out over a number of
years to re engineer the model. So we figured out
a way to make a lower cost theater and put
it in a commercial setting in multiplex as a lever
(10:28):
off the infrastructure of the multiplex, and then we use
technology over time to figure out how to go from
analog to digital. So, just to give you in the
same set of facts, one print in one theater now
cost fifty dollars down from thirty to forty thousand, and
putting an IMAX theater in a multiplex now costs I
(10:51):
don't know. We do join ventures, so maybe it costs nothing.
We may partner with somebody to do it. So we
developed a model that was much more workable, and it
kind of chugged along and did okay. The first breakthrough
on the film side was Roy Disney did a film
called Fantasia two thousand in the year two thousand and
(11:12):
Disney released it only in Imax and it was a
huge success, and that spurred a lot of the commercial
exhibitors to build more theaters, and the more theaters created
more demand for movies or others along the way. But
the biggest next one was in twenty ten, Jim Cameron
did Avatar one and at that time we had about
(11:35):
two hundred theaters in the world, and on those two
hundred theaters, Imax did two hundred and fifty million dollars,
so we did over ten percent of the global box
office in like a handful of theaters. So that really
accelerated the growth. Every exhibitor kind of started to look
(11:55):
at it and said, those numbers, I've never seen numbers
like that. We got to get Imax, and then a
lot of the studios said, you know, oh, my god,
those results are incredible. We got to get more imaxes,
so that supercharged our growth and led to where we
are today. In addition to the seventeen hundred plus, we've
got another four hundred and fifty and backlog, which means
(12:18):
they're signed and they're about to roll out.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
It's quite a growth pattern, quite a growth spurt. Paul,
of course, being a music icon, he'd be interested to
hear about what happened when you decided to make a
deal with Taylor Swift to Twitter aristour on IMAX. A
lot of people, even friends of ours, thought you were
nuts when you did that. You know, who's going to
go to a mood theater to watch a film of
(12:41):
Taylor Swift performing. But Paul, especially he and I were
talking about this before, is particularly intrigued by what you
did there.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
So to be clear, we were a part of it,
but the lead was done by AMC Theaters and Taylor
was going to studios and looking for ways to do
the Erros tour, and as studios being studios, you know,
looked at it and said, okay, we'll take you know,
fifty percent of the action roughly, and we'll give fifty
(13:11):
percent of the action to the exhibitor and they could
sell concessions. So AMC went to the Swift family and
you probably know they're a close knit group and they
don't use outside advisors, and said, well, what if the
exhibitors release it and we cut the studios out of
(13:31):
their fifty percent. And it was a new model that
no one had really looked at before. And the person
at AMC Wallly was negotiating with the Swift family called
up me and others and said, would you be in
if you were part of the team that we were
kind of self distributing. So the economics for Taylor Swift
(13:54):
were unlike any economics anyone seen in a movie like that,
and it a lot of traction and became an incredible success,
and Paul, you would find this interesting. We proposed later,
you know, why not release it in China, and you know,
we have a very big presence in China, and the
(14:14):
Swift family kind of at first restrained and said, you know,
who's going to go to a Taylor Swift concert in China?
And we worked I think it was with Ali Baba,
and we helped get the government approvals and we got
it into China and it actually did, you know, much
better than we ever would have thought. And you know
that result in China has led us to where now
(14:37):
we're considering doing a lot of other music things in China.
And since you're interested in music obviously specifically, you know
this year we've done a Queen We took an old
Queen concert forty years old, and we repurposed it and
we released it United States and a few other countries,
and we did five million dollars in one weekend a
(15:00):
forty year old concert. Disney Plus released The Beach Boys,
a documentary and it was premiered in Imax before that.
So Taylor, Swift and Beyonce, I think we're more than
just the concerts themselves, but I think they opened a
whole new area of business for us and Paul, whenever
you're ready, we're ready to go.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Richard. The old great quote of a great writer, William Goldman,
about Hollywood nobody knows anything. Was it hard to break
into the system of studios, directors, theaters that have been
evolving for years? How'd you persuade Hollywood to adapt to
(15:42):
your model?
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Fantastic question. And the answer to the conclusion that I'll
back up is we couldn't, so we changed our model
to plug into the Hollywood model. And it's part of
the the answer the first question Skip asked me so
related to that. My partner at the time went up
to Steven Spielberg and said, would you make a movie
(16:03):
for Imax? And it's probably twenty or twenty five years ago,
and Spielberg said, when you get up to one thousand screens,
you'll give me a phone call. And you know, by
the way, at the time, we laughed, thinking there was
no way we'd ever get to a thousand screens, that
that was not really possible, but we made it just
much more plug and play. So directors weren't going to
(16:27):
film everything with Imax cameras, which you had to do
at that time, so we figured out a way to
convert thirty five millimeter images into Imax cameras. So instead
of having to make one hundred or more million dollar movie,
we could take a Hollywood movie you'll like Avatar or
our first Hollywood movies were really the Matrix ones at
(16:50):
that time, and for not a lot of money converted
into Imax. And again on the theater side, instead of
saying you got to build a separate building and you've
got to hire a separate staff. We figured out how
to fit into the multiplex. Unfortunately I hadn't read that
quote at that time, so I wasted a lot of
time trying to convince them to get into the Imax business.
(17:15):
And it really was a lot of feudal years because
that just was never going to happen. So once we
figured out we had to change our model to get
into their business, that was really the breakthrough point for us.
Can you talk about your involvement in Oppenheimer?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
I can't tell you that. When Chris Nolan got the
Academy Award and he gave you a shout out. I mean,
Edie and I were at home watching the Academy Awards,
it was like unbelievable drew your name into his acceptance speech.
But how did you first get involved in Openhimer, which was,
by any standard, I think the greatest movie of the year,
maybe the greatest movie of a lot of years. But
(17:55):
how did you get involved in that?
Speaker 3 (17:56):
So we've worked with Chris for twenty years, and Emma,
we did all the Dark Knight that trilogy, and we
did Dunkirk, and we did Interstellar and we did you know,
pretty much every big movie he's involved with. Chris is meticulous, demanding,
a genius, and his partners really have to rise to
(18:20):
his level, whether it's talent or technology or whatever his
partner's role is. And we became, you know, very close
as a group, almost you know, seamless in the way
we work together. And then about eighteen months or two
years before the movie came out, I think I was
at Chris's house. He told me about his plans for
(18:42):
the movie and filming it in Imax, and I said, gee,
I'd like to learn more about it. So he said,
here's this book to order, American Prometheus. And he said,
you know, read this book and then come back and
talk to me. So I didn't know when I said
sure that the book was like six hundred pages with
eight hundred footnotes. So I spent my summer reading that book.
(19:06):
The book was fantastic, it was amazing. And went back
and discussed the story and discussed, you know, how he
was going to shoot it and how we could be helpful.
And you know, he's always incredibly innovative. So in Tenant,
for example, he used the camera backwards to capture certain scenes,
(19:27):
and in Oppenheimer, he was going to use big black
and white sequences to capture images, which, if you remember, Skip,
that's a lot of the trajectory of the movie. So
there was no such thing as black and white Imax
film stock. So with Nolan and his team and with
(19:48):
Kodak and our team, we proceeded to try and figure
out how to invent that, and once it was invented,
you know, how to use it, how to develop it.
Chris shot a lot of the movie with Imax cameras,
ones that we had, you know, invented and keep maintaining
and keep working with him and his team on different
(20:09):
lenses and different parts. You know, a team from Imax,
David and Patricia Keely, who run our quality control, were
embedded in the production while he was shooting it for
a long time. And then we're also involved in the
post production of it. We were involved in the dating
of it, and you might remember Skip that it was
(20:31):
dated very close to Mission Impossible seven and Tom Cruise
wasn't very happy that he was losing the Imax network
to Chris's movie, and we were a lot under a
lot of pressure, not only from Tom and Paramount, but
from a lot of exhibitors in the world kind of
our partners saying, how could you possibly pull mission off
(20:53):
the screen? You know Froppenheimer, And again, having worked with
the Nolans for such a long period of time, you know,
we had all the faith in the world that Oppenheimer
was going to be a lot more than a docudrama
about a physicist, and as you know, it was, so
we steadfastly supported the film and Chris and Emma we
(21:16):
wouldn't get muscled out of it. We always have loyalty
to our filmmakers, but we certainly have particularly loyalty to
them and took a lot of heat for it. So
I think we get involved very early. So I think,
you know, the shout out had to do with a
lot of loyalty over a long period of time and
(21:39):
not a lot of collaboration, which helped the film and
definitely raised our game.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Sure, what factors do you attribute to people going back
to theaters?
Speaker 3 (22:08):
You know, maybe Paul not being a little glib, but
I think they never wanted to leave the theaters, and
I never believed that they were going to leave. I
think when the pandemic happened, people didn't go to theaters,
but they couldn't leave their homes. And I think the
streaming industry and Wall Street really hopped on that narrative.
(22:28):
And what they said was people are never going to
go back to movies. And you had, you know, certain
studios at that time, the most well known was Warners,
which you know, said the narrative, why don't we give
you the content on streaming so you don't have to
go to theaters? And you know, I think a lot
of the streaming services, including Netflix, really benefited from the
(22:52):
narrative that people were never going to go back to
the movies and they were always going to watch on streaming.
And I think there was a lot of self interest.
And by the way, it really pissed me off because
you know, movies have been around for one hundred years
and people forgot to say they weren't going because they
were locked in their homes. Now, you know, the narrative was,
(23:14):
you know, why go to a movie when you could
see it in your home. But there's also a narrative,
why go to a restaurant when you have a kitchen
in your home? Because it's an entirely different experience. It's
a communal experience. I mean, why see Paul Anka in
concert if you can put a record on and listen
to it, because it's just a totally different thing. It's
(23:37):
a social experience, and I think self interested people really
leaned into a narrative that was never true. And when
you know, the pandemic lifted and when there was content available,
people went back to the movies because they liked movies,
and they didn't start watching on their television shows. And
(23:58):
I also think the way that movies are released is
very different than streaming. So, you know, streaming, the creative
process is different, the standards are different, the actors are different.
They're just not the same animal. And I think during
a period when people had no choice, they watched them
(24:20):
in their living room. The other thing was the sequence
of watching. So we just saw actually a really good
streaming movie starring Glenn Powell, Hitman, and you know, my
wife turned to me and she said, you know, God,
we should have watched that in a movie theater, because
you know, we stopped when we had to go to
(24:40):
the bathroom. We stopped. We wanted to get a glass
of water. We watched half of it one day and
we watched half of it another day. We still really
enjoyed it, but it wasn't like watching it in a
movie theater. It wasn't nearly as satisfying. And I still
think there's a little bit of a tail on it
because of the strike last year. So there's less content
(25:02):
right now than quote unquote normal. But I think as
the world returns to normal, the level of movie going
will return to normal. Now I need to remind you
guys that IMAX is a lot different than a movie theater,
and because it creates such a special experience and such
(25:23):
a premium experience. And you know, we don't just play movies.
We play documentaries, we play music, we play sports events,
a lot of different things. And I think as the
pandemic has ended, people really want to get out of
their homes and they really want to see things in premium.
So concerts is a great example. You know, the businesses
(25:45):
come back in a really big way, and sports people
want to see them in a very premium way, and
they're paying more and coming back more. And I think
as we get to twenty five and twenty six and
look at what the content is going forward, more and
more people are going to come back. And for IMAX,
(26:06):
our twenty nineteen was our best year ever. And the
best year for the movie business, and in twenty twenty
three our box office was very similar because I think
for special things that want to be cultural events, people
want to go see them out of their home. They
want to see them with their friends, and they want
(26:27):
to cheer with everyone else sitting next to them. So
you know, I think they're not only going to come back,
but be better than ever on a global scale.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
So our resident movie expert is our producer Jordan, who
has been witness from day one. He was really excited
that he was going to get to see you and
listen to you. So, Jordan, did you have a question
for Rich?
Speaker 7 (26:49):
Yeah, I am so thrilled to talk to you. I'm
a former film student and I graduated NYU around the
time Avatar was in theaters, and it was so thrilling
to watch this metamorphosis in how we see movie. I
remember I had a professor to describe it as you know,
almost like being around when we first got talkies in movies,
which I think isn't far off. Christopher Nolan has arguably
(27:10):
been the highest profile champion for the IMAX film format
in recent years. Who do you see are the new
directors who are taking up that mantle.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Earlier this year we released Dune, which was shot in
Imax by Denis Villeneu, and again the results were spectacular.
On only eight tens of one percent of the world screens,
we did twenty percent of the Dune box office, and
it was kind of like appointment viewing, meaning a lot
(27:39):
of movies they do these big numbers on opening weekend
and then they trail off over a period of time,
But for Dune in Imax, it continued to sell out
for weeks and months, so he's certainly a big proponent.
Krie Fuganaka shot one of the Bond movies with Imax cameras,
(28:01):
and you know, he said to me, once you've frowned
first class, you don't like going back to the coach
section anymore. JJ Abrams is working on a project right
now in Imax. Marvel is working on two or three
movies shot in Imax. Paul Thomas Anderson you must be
(28:21):
a fan giving you a love for film, is doing
a movie next year starring Leonardo DiCaprio that he's shooting
in Imax. Ryan Coogler, who did Black Panther, is now
shooting a film with Imax. Film cameras. Warner Brothers and
James Gunn are doing the Next Superman with Imax cameras.
(28:43):
Chuck Roven is doing the movie Mercy with Imax cameras.
Chris mcquarie is filming the Next Mission Impossible. Eighth. So,
the success of Oppenheimer and Dune at the box office
combined with the way filmmakers love the way it looks
and they love the experience, the sound, the big screen,
(29:06):
the resolution, the brightness, how black the blacks are. All
of that, you know, make people really want to get
further involved in IMAX, and I think it becomes self fulfilling,
where you know, the more movies that are shot that
way and shown that way, the more people are going
to be exposed to them, and the more that happens,
the more they're going to want to do it. And
(29:28):
bigger box office means studios want to get on board.
And I'd say right now there are probably more filmmakers
who want to shoot in imax than there are available slots.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Richard, is there a dream project that you've been trying
to get off the ground personally?
Speaker 3 (29:45):
There are a lot of them. I mean, Avatar was
a marriage made in heaven when I was in twenty ten,
which is fourteen years ago. Jim Cameron called me over
to the old Spruce Goose in la where he was
using that facility to make it, and he pulled out
like one of those projectors you have in your house
(30:05):
to look at movies of your kids, and he put
up a little kind of like a home style projector,
and he showed me like seven minutes of Avatar, and
the way it used three D and the way it
the images popped, the color is the whole thing. I
actually called my office and I said, you know, I
(30:27):
couldn't have envisioned it something looking this good in our format,
and it really did so. And by the way, the
second Avatar did over two billion dollars and also did
two hundred and fifty million dollars in imax. You know,
Paull experiential things for me. So we just did the
NBA Finals and we released them in Hong Kong and
(30:51):
Taiwan at seven thirty in the morning, and they looked
so amazing. In imax. We like to use the words
awe inspiring, so I think of awe inspiring experiences. Some
of my favorites. We did the Rolling Stones at Wembley
filmed it in Imax, and when it first came out,
people were standing on their chairs with lighters lit because
(31:13):
it was like you were very much there. One of
my favorites is we took Imax cameras to the top
of Mount Everest and at the time that John Krakauer
wrote the book about the tragedy there, and you know,
when you go into an Imax theater and you see that,
it's incredible. I can't answer it by saying there's one.
(31:34):
But we do use like awe inspiring as kind of
the test run of which we decide whether we want
to do something or not. And literally today I was
meeting with my head of documentaries and my first question
to him when he pitches ideas, I said, is it
an Imax experience? And that's kind of our standard because
(31:55):
I have no interest in doing my dinner with Andre
or doing sideways. You know the Paul Giamatti movie where
two people drank wine on a sidewalk. Iman I passed.
Not that it's not a good movie, but it's just
not an Imax movie. So it's got to be something
that really clicks. You could experience it and we could
take you somewhere, so you know, I don't know if
(32:17):
you've got a chance to see them, but we made
I think it's seven or eight movies from space. We
put our cameras in the Space Shuttle. We put our
cameras in the International Space Station, and a lot of
the astronauts became astronauts because they saw those movies. It
was transporting. It made them feel like they were there.
(32:40):
You know, that's a list of the kinds of experiences
that we like doing.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
You know, Richard, I lived in England and I was
there in the early sixties when the British kind of
caught onto what we were doing and did it better.
And a young kid wound up in a club around
this corner from my hotel. His name was Jimmy Hendrix,
and he changed everything. And you've got a picture behind
(33:05):
you of Mick Jagger and Jimmy Hendrix. What's the significance
of that for you?
Speaker 3 (33:11):
Well, I went to Electric Ladies Studios, which is, as
you know, in New York, the place that he used
to record. And I love music, and there was a
group of people there that where we were. They were
building a special theater in Canada, and they were talking
to us about doing Imax, and they invited me there
(33:33):
so I could capture the spirit of Hendrix and having
done actually we did two movies with Mick Jagger. We
did another one with Martin Scorsese as well as the
one we did at Wembley Stadium, and as I said,
really some of my favorite stuff done. And one of
the people there was an expert photographer and he had
(33:56):
this picture and I asked him if I could have it,
as I thought it really symbolized some of our aspirations
in terms of brilliant image quality, sound, transporting people. Certainly
both the Stones and Jimmy transported people to different places,
(34:16):
so it was symbolic for me. You can't see my
other wall, Paul, but there I have an old black
and white photo of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, the
real ones in like an intense meeting about probably the
future of science. So that just opposes itself. And then
I should tell you about a small one you can't
(34:37):
see right behind me, which is of John Lennon and
Yoko Ono with a woman named Tony Myers. And Tony
Myers is a former colleague of mine who unfortunately passed away,
and she filmed those space movies, and she filmed the
Stones movie. So those are my three photos and why
(34:58):
they all inter relate.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
I'm glad you love music.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Yeah, you know, not to give him a plug because
he doesn't need it. But I first saw Paul in
concert forty years ago, and I went again recently when
he performed here in LA. It's better than it was
forty years ago.
Speaker 6 (35:15):
Show.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
It's just it's off the hook. It's so good. It
would look great in imax. The sound. I mean, it's
all about the music, of course.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
So Paul, we have the ability to do live concerts.
In the last few years, we wired about two hundred
and fifty theaters around the world, mostly in New York
and mostly in the United States. Sorry, I'm confusing New
York and the United States. I know you guys are
in LA. I apologize, But we've experimented with a bunch
(35:43):
of live concerts. People were going crazy because, as you know,
at a concert today, it's a lot of big, you know,
lit up led screens and other screens. You can't see
that well. Obviously, we have great seats, you can We're
a better auditory. But when people saw it in imax,
they kind of flipped out. We did a Brandy Carlisle
(36:06):
event which was I'm very successful live. We did Andre
three thousand. So when you're ready to talk about it, Paul,
we could see if it works.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Oh, come at you skip an eye together?
Speaker 3 (36:18):
Is skip putting up the money?
Speaker 1 (36:20):
You know he isn't listen. You know we're at the age.
We're at the ages now, Richard, where we only signed
the back of checks.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
We don't sign the front of checks. We signed the
backup checks. So rich How's going to ask you a
(36:51):
sort of a funny question. But when you walk into an
empty IMAX theater, where would you sit? What's the ideal
spot if you had to sit in one spot in
the field.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Probably three rows from the back, skip in the middle,
But it depends on the theater. By the way, this
is off point, but you'll find it interesting. One of
the best IMAX experience I've ever had is we did
a three D movie from Space and we showed it
in one of our theaters in Shanghai to a bunch
(37:22):
of kids. And obviously they'd never been to space, they'd
never seen three D. And to watch those kids kind
of freak out and reach for the floating things and
you know, laugh and go crazy was an amazingly inspiring experience.
And you know, I guess it is part of your question.
It didn't matter where they sat, you know, every seat
(37:44):
was better than they could experience a lot of things
in life. But you know, as I said in the
beginning towards the.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Back, you have your private theater here in LA and
you arranged for Ead and I and some friends to
go and see a James Bond movie there. And I
was surprised. Actually three or four of the people had
never been in an imax. They were like, you know,
you've referred to these kids, they've never seen anything like
it before. The reaction was amazing. But I was going
(38:10):
to say to you, Oppenheimer is such a special movie.
It's such an incredible film at a time when you know,
we have a screening room at our house and to
find a good movie to watch is very challenging these days.
I mean, we'll get six different films over six weeks,
and frankly, five of them aren't really worth watching. But
(38:32):
Oppenheimer was such an special experience. I found that it
was better the second time I saw it.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, most great movies, you can watch them three or
four times and pick up on things that you never
picked up initially.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Well, one of the things about IMAX also is it
such a large experience. Your eye could shop the screen.
So you know, usually in us at home or in
a smaller auditorium, you know, you're I goes with the
director sent you, so that's what you see. But in
an IMAX, your eye looks all around. And I saw
(39:08):
Oppenheimer three times in Imax, and I was amazed the
third time at how much I had picked up. You
know that I couldn't pick up and skip. I've tried
telling you many times to throw out that screening room
and go to Imax theaters because it's just not as good.
That's why you don't like the movies as much.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Well, the content of some of the movies lately is
just not really up to par. But do me favorite,
because we don't have a lot of time left, just
explain a typical day for rich Galfond, Like what time
you get up, what do you do first, where do
you go first, where do you spend most of your day,
When do you finish your day? Just give us a
sense of what it's like.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Sure, I get up around six thirty in the morning,
I go to my gym and I work out for
about forty five minutes, watching the business news shows, and
read both my emails and kind of the newspapers for
a couple hours. I leave for the office around nine.
And then you know, when I get to the office,
(40:12):
I'm a walker by management style. I'm skips So I
like walking around and seeing my reports and finding out
what's going on because I find, you know, you get
the best ideas from interacting with your colleagues. And then
I'd say probably about a third of the day is
spent on phone calls or meetings with my colleagues. And
(40:34):
you know, there's people who run like our theater business,
parts of our film business. Since we're so global and
have such a big footprint around the world, I'll almost
every day talk to someone part of my team in
London or part of our team in China, and you
know about what's coming up, what the problems are there
where we go. Then probably a third of the time
(40:57):
is externally focused on a combination of investor issues, public
relations issues, filmmaker issues. And lately I've been spending a
lot more of my time on content. So what's in
the pipeline, what are the ideas, what are the budgets?
And then probably the rest of the time is combined
(41:18):
with thinking about strategy and what we should be doing.
I mean, if I think, if you're good CEO, you
always think about strategy in terms of the little issues
and how they relate to the bigger issues. But I
do think, especially in the entertainment business now, and you
know we've hit on a little of this, but you know,
how do you compete with streaming? How do you make
(41:40):
sure you're global? You know, how do you deal with
the issues facing the disneys and the warners and the paramounts,
you know, And then probably spend another brief period of
time with our mutual friend Alan Grubman, who tries to
tell me how to do my job better than I do.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Dear Allen, Hey, Richard, I want to ask you a
question that AI is obviously changing the world and continue
it's probably in the second inning. The music business is
already feeling it. What's your take on AI and the
film business?
Speaker 3 (42:16):
That is, you know, the most timely question. Certainly, I've
spent so much more time learning about AI than I
ever thought I would. In the last six to eight months,
and I think it's going to happen a lot faster
than everyone thinks, even though they think it's going to
happen fast. I think it's going to happen faster, and
(42:37):
I think it's going to be more revolutionary then people
think it's kind of going to be like the Internet
changed the world. I was at a conference with one
of the senior people at Navidio and he said, it's
going to happen ten times faster than you think. And
I think in the movie business, it's going to happen
in two big buckets. One, the less obvious one is
(43:00):
going to be to the business of Hollywood. So the
cost of special effects is going to go down. You're
going to be able to make special effects a lot
better and a lot cheaper and a lot faster. I
think your business process is going to change. You're going
to be able to use a storyboarding for your movies,
which you know take a long time. You'll be able
(43:22):
to do them really quickly, much less expensively. And then
I think distribution, so things in post production today like
w your movies into different languages. You're gonna be able
to use AI to do that. You know, programming show times,
all kinds of things. And then the other half is
(43:44):
on the content side that's probably going to be a
little bit slower, but it's the sexier one and that's
what people are talking about. I sat next to a
director recently who is working with one of these companies
about text to video, and he gave me, like sitting
at a dinner table, a demonstration of what you could do,
(44:05):
and it was profound. And I know people are really
focused on loss of jobs and things like that, but
you know, I believe like other technoques, like when the
car came around, you know, people were focused on the
loss of jobs in the horse and buggy business. But
I think it's going to be the democratization of content.
(44:28):
I think there's going to be so many barriers to
people other than studios making content and indie people, and
I think it's going to knock down a lot of walls,
and I think it's going to open so much opportunity.
And by the way, not just on the creative side
and making movies, but right now you you know, you
(44:49):
and I can't go in to the special effects business
because the barriers are too high. But I think with
AI it's going to you know, open a lot of
opportunities for a lot of people people, So, you know,
I think we obviously have to be careful on how
we roll it out, and at IMAX, we're looking at
different applications and one of the first places we went
(45:12):
was our legal department to make sure that, you know,
you don't create something that you can't ultimately control where
the data goes and what data goes there. But you
have to be really thoughtful about it. But I think
if you're thoughtful about it, there are just amazing opportunities.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
So the fear is not AI itself, it's the person
that's using it.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
It is and that's one Paul that you know, it
even scares me a little. I haven't I don't have
an answer to that. People a lot smarter than I
am and people more experienced don't have an answer to that.
But I think it's a real challenge. I don't think
it's a, you know, a one year challenge. I think
it's probably more of a you know, I was going
(45:58):
to say five years, but maybe three a five year challenge,
and we definitely have to be in front of that.
And I think there definitely needs to be some government
regulation of it to make sure that doesn't happen too quickly,
and I think that the focus on it is none
too soon.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
I agree, Jordan, We've got to wrap fairly quickly. But
did you have another question you want to ask Rich?
Speaker 7 (46:23):
I mean, this is probably an unfair question, but of
all the projects you have in the pipeline, is there
one that you're most excited about?
Speaker 3 (46:30):
Well, I'll just talk about one that I'm very excited
about that Apple is doing and we're distributing. But it's
Joe Kazinski who did I'm Top Gun Maverick. He was
the director. He's doing a movie on Formula One starring
Brad Pitt, and you see even you're excited about it.
And I've only seen, you know, a couple minutes of it,
(46:53):
but some of the expertise that came from making Top
Gun Maverick in Imax and how it was and the
story to the extent I know about it is exciting.
And obviously F one has so many fans all over
the world, and we have this global network and they're
leaning in I. You know, there are others that you know,
(47:15):
may have equal box office potential and financial but I'm
just really excited as a movie fan to see it.
Speaker 7 (47:22):
Oh, I can't wait to check that out.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
I'm so excited.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
I know you had a window here that you carved
out for us, which I really appreciate. I know you've
got it to get on to another meeting, but Paul
and I greatly appreciate you taking the time to do this.
You're so knowledgeable about not just the technical aspect of it,
but even the roots of films and why they work
and why they don't work. And I just was excited
(47:45):
about getting you on today, so we really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Well, Thanksgip and thanks Paul very much. Enjoyed doing it.
And we'll see you at the Imax movie. Skip not
your screening room.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Okay, you got it.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Nice to meet you, Richard, look to sing in future.
Speaker 3 (48:01):
Take care, Nice to take care.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
See you by.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
Our away with Paul, Anka and Skip. Bronson is a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
The show's executive producer is Jordan Runtogg, with supervising producer
and editor Marcy Depina.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
It was engineered by Todd Carlin and Graham Gibson, mixed
and mastered by the wonderful Mary Do.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Found politic
Host
Paul Anka
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