Two chains pass on an IMAX exclusive
Netflix’s Thanksgiving bet on David Fincher’s ‘The Further Mis-adventures of Cliff Booth’ just got a narrower footprint. Regal and Cinemark have declined to book the Brad Pitt film on their IMAX screens for the November 25 IMAX-exclusive launch, IndieWire reports. That leaves AMC’s worldwide IMAX locations plus a handful of smaller circuits carrying the film, for a global footprint of about 550 IMAX screens.
- Opens November 25 as an IMAX-exclusive theatrical run; hits Netflix December 23.
- Regal and Cinemark opt out; AMC plus smaller circuits supply roughly 550 IMAX screens worldwide.
- Exhibitors are expected to hold ‘Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping’ for a second weekend instead.
Why exhibitors are choosing the holdover
The arithmetic for a theatre chain is simple. A franchise title with an exclusive theatrical window can generate several weekends of premium-ticket revenue. A film that lands on Netflix less than a month later turns an IMAX slot into a short, risky booking. IndieWire notes that IMAX usually dictates titles and gives exhibitors little choice; here, because IMAX joined late, it let chains opt out and keep ‘Hunger Games’.
This is the collision between streaming economics and high-cost exhibition. A short window can make a film feel like promotional spending rather than a shared theatrical event. The same friction appeared this week around Amazon’s ‘Ali G: Who Iz I?’, which opened in only 150 select theatres as a brief stunt and is now being skipped by Regal, Alamo Drafthouse and AMC for an extended run, with no box-office data reported. Amazon did not say how many screens the film will play on this weekend.
What the screen map signals
For media planners and entertainment marketers, the lesson is to model IMAX reach chain by chain, not as a single national number. Losing Cinemark and Regal removes two circuits, but AMC’s majority position—about 200 U.S. IMAX screens—still gives Netflix coverage in most major U.S. IMAX markets. The global figure of about 550 screens sounds substantial, but it is thinner than a Fincher-Pitt holiday release could have drawn.
Netflix had already moved Greta Gerwig’s ‘Narnia’ to February to give it a longer run and a clearer IMAX window. That trade-off is now visible: premium-screen access requires enough distance from a streaming date to make exhibitors see a real theatrical window. Release teams should lock screen commitments before announcing a date, or accept that some circuits will choose the proven holdover.
Source: IndieWire
