After IMAX Corporation announced a significant expansion in the Philippines on Monday, the company CEO said the movie platform is increasing the aperture of visual storytelling.

“We ended last year with almost the equivalent of 2019 revenues and box office,” said IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond, during an interview with BNN Bloomberg on Monday.

“The regular cinema industry was down about 20 per cent from the record year and we are pretty much even with 2019. The first quarter’s gotten off to a good start.”

Gelfond attributes this good start, in part, to the box office success of “Dune: Part Two,” which he says brought in “about $145 million.”

He also pointed out that about 21 per cent of the global box office was IMAX screenings for that movie.

“IMAX on eight-tenths of one per cent of the screens did one in five tickets in the world,” he said. “So things are going pretty well for us. 

Last summer’s success of “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” inspired new faith in investors’ sentiment towards the movie business, but Gelfond says the “consistency of over-indexing,” beyond Hollywood blockbusters is what’s most notable. 

“When you film with IMAX cameras and you project in IMAX, either film or digital, and you have a really good movie and really good directors, we vastly over-index. I think we’ve seen numbers like this before in some of the Christopher Nolan movies, but the consistency of over-indexing is what’s notable.”

He added that IMAX has been broadening its content beyond traditional movies. 

“During the first quarter, we played a Queen’s concert from 40 years ago that we remastered,” he said. “We did a very nice $5.5 million over a weekend.”

He also mentioned that IMAX theatres plan to screen the opening ceremony for the next Olympics. “So not only are we over-indexing on Hollywood,” he said. “We’re widening the kinds of content we put on our platform.”

Gelfond explained that more films are getting filmed with IMAX cameras for releases next summer, including the next installment of “Mission Impossible,” some Marvel Movies, and a Formula 1 movie. 

“Customers are coming in greater numbers, exhibitors want those customers at a higher ticket price, they’re signing theatres at a greater number. Studios and filmmakers are wanting to film in IMAX in greater numbers. It creates a kind of virtuous cycle, which is going on right now.”

This summer, Gelfond expects box office IMAX success in titles such as “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” “Despicable Me 4” and “Deadpool and Wolverine.” He also mentioned the expected buzz of numerous foreign language films

“The IMAX platform has really demonstrated that it’s the best place to tell stories historically and get audiences to come in and watch visual and audio effects,” he said. 

“We’re broadening that now.”

To watch the rest of Gelfond’s interview with BNN Bloomberg, watch the video above.