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.
Our Way with yours truly paul Anka and my buddy Skip Bronson is a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, folks, this is Paul Anka.
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.
And welcome to Our Way. We'd like you to meet some real good friends of ours.
Your leaders in entertainment and.
Sports, innovators in business and technology, and even a sitting president or two.
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.
This is our podcast and we'll be doing it our way.
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 I said, you know, I couldn't have envisioned something looking this good in our format.
Hello, Hey, hey, Glad I got you. I'm glad I got me too.
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.
Well you got to be able to be conditioned to miss me for one day, darling. But I was sitting outside the heats unbelievable.
Oh my god.
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.
But your buddy's coming in. Huh. Yeah, Rich Gelfon.
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.
I mean, he's highly involved in fact.
You know, when Oppenheimer won the Academy Award, Chris Nolan, the director, you know, gave a shout out to Rich, which was really cool.
You know, they're reading up on him. It's quite the success story. Yeah.
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 know action films, it's definitely next level.
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.
I'll have to.
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.
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 even a business anymore in the movie business, like American airlines.
But I have to tell you, you know, we screened movies at our house.
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, you should really watch this film.
It's tough, and most of them are just too long.
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.
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 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.
You know, the technology is advancing, yeah, so much.
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 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.
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.
Yeah, you're gonna like him.
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.
Time that thanks, you'd be surprised what I watch him when I get up, you're just rolling over it.
Then no, no, no, no no.
If I'm rolling over with somebody with me, no no, I get up.
You know, I do my homework and my.
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.
But I talk myself into that one.
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 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.
Yeah.
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.
Well, I was thinking about you, but I guess that's not gonna happen.
I'll talk to them wrong. Take care of it all right, by.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 they're signed and they're about to roll out.
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 Taylor Swift performing. But Paul, especially he and I were talking about this before, is particularly intrigued by what you did there.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 your model?
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 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 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 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. 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?
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 how did you get involved in that?
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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 not a lot of collaboration, which helped the film and definitely raised our game.
Sure, what factors do you attribute to people going back to theaters?
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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
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?
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 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.
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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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.
Richard, is there a dream project that you've been trying to get off the ground personally?
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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. You know, that's a list of the kinds of experiences that we like doing.
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 you of Mick Jagger and Jimmy Hendrix. What's the significance of that for you?
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 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 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, 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 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 they all inter relate.
I'm glad you love music.
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.
Show.
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.
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 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 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.
Oh, come at you skip an eye together?
Is skip putting up the money?
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.
We don't sign the front of checks. We signed the backup checks. So rich How's going to ask you a 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.
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 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 was better than they could experience a lot of things in life. But you know, as I said in the beginning towards the.
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 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 Oppenheimer was such an special experience. I found that it was better the second time I saw it.
Yeah, most great movies, you can watch them three or four times and pick up on things that you never picked up initially.
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 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.
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.
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, 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 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 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 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 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.
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?
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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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.
So the fear is not AI itself, it's the person that's using it.
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 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.
I agree, Jordan, We've got to wrap fairly quickly. But did you have another question you want to ask Rich?
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?
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, 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, may have equal box office potential and financial but I'm just really excited as a movie fan to see it.
Oh, I can't wait to check that out.
I'm so excited.
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 about getting you on today, so we really appreciate it.
Well, Thanksgip and thanks Paul very much. Enjoyed doing it. And we'll see you at the Imax movie. Skip not your screening room.
Okay, you got it.
Nice to meet you, Richard, look to sing in future.
Take care, Nice to take care.
See you by.
Our away with Paul, Anka and Skip. Bronson is a production of iHeartRadio.
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