Who Buys IMAX?

The premium-format company has opened the door to a sale. The list of plausible owners is shorter than Wall Street thinks.

The Wall Street Journal reported on 21 May that IMAX has approached entertainment companies as potential buyers, with the stock jumping roughly 15% on the news and Benchmark lifting its price target from $44 to $60. The process is, by every account, early. A source told CNBC that IMAX has held only “preliminary talks” through intermediaries and that no formal pitches have been made. None of which has stopped the analyst community from publishing buyer lists running to nine and ten names.

It is worth slowing down before working through those lists, because the IMAX situation is not what most coverage is making of it. (I wrote in December about how Wall Street finally learned to love IMAX; this is what happens next.) Let’s dive in on what is actually likely to happen next.

Two stories, one company

What broke last week is two stories that have been quietly merging for months.

The first is the strategic one. At IMAX’s investor day on 4 December, CEO Rich Gelfond told shareholders that the company was “an incredibly valuable player, either as a wholly differentiated publicly-traded company or as part of a larger company with the keys to unlock even greater value.” That was the formal signal. Wall Street heard it, and the share price has reflected it ever since.

The second story is harder to write about, but cannot be left out. On 30 March, IMAX announced that Gelfond was on temporary medical leave undergoing treatment for pneumonia. He has since returned to work. Gelfond is 70. He bought IMAX in a leveraged buyout in 1994, became co-CEO that year and sole CEO in 2009. His current contract runs to 2028. There is no publicly identified successor. He is Warren Buffett without a Greg Abel, let alone a Charlie Munger.

The senior team that covered during his absence (Natasha Fernandes as CFO, Anne Globe as CMO, Rob Lister as Chief Legal Officer, Mark Welton as President of IMAX Theatres) is genuinely strong, but none of them is currently positioned as the heir - even if there might be a Josh D’Amaro amongst them. Board Chair Darren Throop ran point. That is a holding pattern rather than a succession plan, and Wall Street understands the difference. Once you accept that the company is at a transition point that does not have an obvious internal answer, a sale process looks less like opportunism and more like prudent governance.

What is actually being sold

The single most important thing to understand about an IMAX sale is what the buyer would actually be acquiring. IMAX is not a cinema operator. (Read that again.) It owns and runs almost no theatres. What it owns is:

• A proprietary projection, audio, and remastering technology stack (including a small but expanding 70mm film footprint).

• A licensing relationship with roughly 1,860 sites across 91 countries, which pay for installation, maintenance, and a share of box office.

• A globally recognised consumer brand that audiences will demonstrably pay a premium ticket price for, even when they cannot quite articulate why.

• An increasingly entrenched position in the production pipeline through “Filmed for IMAX,” with directors from Christopher Nolan to Ryan Coogler treating it as a creative format rather than a distribution upcharge.

• IMAX China, fully consolidated in 2023 at $124 million when the parent took the Hong Kong-listed minority private.

That is an asset-light, royalty-driven, brand-led business. It happens to live inside cinema, but it is much closer in shape to a Dolby or a Bose than to an AMC or a Cineworld. Any buyer analysis has to start there, because it disqualifies most of the names being floated.

IMAX HQ in Los Angeles

Who probably will not buy

The Hollywood studios are the first to fall away. Texas Capital’s Eric Wold made this point cleanly: a studio that owns IMAX would immediately face every other studio refusing to share box office and release windows with a competitor.

The IMAX calendar works because it is a neutral utility, fought over by everyone but owned by no one. The moment Disney or Warner controls the slate, half the value walks out. Disney’s announcement of Infinity Vision at this year’s CinemaCon (the de-facto PLF certification programme born out of being locked out of IMAX screens for the upcoming Avengers film, which lost out to Warner’s Dune: Part Three) tells you precisely how studios feel about needing IMAX. They resent the dependency. They are not going to deepen it by paying a $3 billion premium for the privilege. The exception, which proves the rule and is treated below, is Sony. (More on them later.)

The cinema circuits fall away for the same reason in reverse. Exhibitors privately refer to IMAX as “four blue letters” and the only thing they resent more than having an IMAX is when their competitor opens one. Cinépolis turns up on analyst lists, presumably because someone needs to put an exhibitor on the page, but no chain wants to control the slate that its competitors play. Kinepolis’s acquisition of Emagine in February (a $105 million deal for 14 sites and 177 screens with proprietary PLF brands) shows where exhibitor M&A is actually going: buying real estate and operations, not buying a licensor that the rest of the circuit has to deal with.

Who could, but probably will not

Netflix is on every list. It should not be. Netflix has spent a decade signalling that it does not believe in the theatrical model, and even its recent softening (the willingness to engage with exhibitors at CinemaCon, the longer windows on Greta Gerwig’s Narnia) is at most a course correction, not a conversion. Buying IMAX would commit Netflix to a theatrical strategy that the company has spent its institutional energy avoiding. Reed Hastings’s departure as Chair gives Netflix room to change direction. There is no evidence it wants to change this far.

Comcast/NBCUniversal could afford it and would understand it, but the regulatory environment for vertical integration in the US is what it is, and Universal already has its own complicated history with windows. (Tower Heist, anyone with a long memory?)

Who actually fits

That leaves four candidates worth taking seriously. Let’s look at them in turn.

Apple. Apple has the cash, the patience, and a content business (Apple TV) that is still searching for a theatrical identity (still waiting for the F1 follow-up film.). Buying IMAX would give Apple instant credibility at the premium end of cinema, a brand that consumers already associate with quality, and a technology platform that fits inside the broader Apple ecosystem story (the Vision Pro work, the audio business, the obsession with format ownership from Lightning to ProRes). The objection is cultural rather than strategic. Apple does not buy brands. It absorbs them. The 2014 $3 billion Beats acquisition, still Apple’s largest-ever deal (!), is the template: the streaming service was folded into Apple Music within eighteen months, the engineering talent was rolled into the in-house audio team, and the Beats marque now survives as a secondary line in a category dominated by AirPods. IMAX is a brand that does not absorb well, and a consumer franchise whose value depends on being visibly IMAX in every market it operates in.

Amazon. Amazon has been the most theatrically committed of the streamers since the MGM acquisition. Project Hail Mary opened to $28 million in IMAX in March and has since cleared $670 million globally. Amazon understands that prestige theatrical releases drive Prime Video subscriptions and that IMAX is the most efficient way to manufacture event-film positioning. The strategic logic is real. The regulatory friction is also real, and the China question (Amazon has effectively no Chinese consumer business; IMAX has 770+ locations there) is awkward. So is the fact that Amazon is no longer really a streamer with a sideline in theatrical. With MGM integrated, a growing originals slate, and a CinemaCon presence increasingly indistinguishable from a major studio’s, Amazon now sits inside the same studio-distrust problem outlined above. The other majors would no more want to share IMAX release windows with an Amazon-owned IMAX than with a Warner-owned or Universal-owned one. The strategic logic that gets Amazon to the table is also what would make every other studio walk away from it.

Sony. Sony is the one studio that has already crossed the line. Its $200 million acquisition of Alamo Drafthouse in June 2024 put a major Hollywood studio back in the exhibition business for the first time since the Paramount Consent Decrees were rescinded in 2020, folded into a new Sony Pictures Experiences division alongside the Wonderverse and Wheel of Fortune Live touring assets. Sony also owned the Loews chain in the 1990s before selling it to AMC, so there is institutional muscle memory here. On the content side, Crunchyroll gives Sony a niche but profitable streaming platform with the largest anime subscriber base in the West, and the December 2024 capital and business alliance with Kadokawa deepened the Japanese IP pipeline that feeds it. All of which maps directly onto IMAX’s expanding fourth silo of anime and local-language tentpoles. Tony Vinciquerra has been the most arm’s-length of the studio chiefs on theatrical economics, and Sony does not have a Disney+ or a Peacock to defend.

The objection is structural and specific to IMAX. Sony’s track record in cinema technology is a graveyard. SDDS, the digital sound format that competed with Dolby and DTS through the 1990s and 2000s, was quietly retired. SXRD, Sony’s digital cinema projector platform, was wound down in 2020, leaving Christie, Barco, Sharp (NEC), and IMAX itself as the surviving names in the auditorium. Sony Entertainment Access Glasses, the closed-captioning eyewear that briefly looked like a real accessibility standard, was also discontinued. The pattern is consistent: Sony enters cinema technology with conviction, and walks away when the unit economics get hard. IMAX is fundamentally a cinema-technology business. The question for Sony’s board is not whether they want the brand, the licensing network, and the filmmaker relationships (they probably do). It is whether they have the institutional patience to keep the technology stack alive once the integration honeymoon ends. That is the kind of question that gets you a discount on your bid, not a premium.

Sphere Entertainment. Benchmark’s Mike Hickey flagged Sphere as the most compelling strategic fit, and on the substance he is right. Sphere has just secured a $1.7 billion deal with the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi for a second full-scale venue on Yas Island, plus the planned “mini-Sphere” at National Harbor. The Sphere segment generated $266 million in revenue in Q1 2026, up 69% year-on-year. The company has a thesis (immersive premium experience as a venue category) and is in expansion mode. IMAX would give Sphere a 1,860-site distribution network it cannot replicate organically, a filmmaker ecosystem it does not have, and a way to push immersive content through cinema while it builds the venue footprint. The objection is balance-sheet size. Sphere’s market cap sits around $1.6 billion. IMAX’s is around $1.9 billion and the takeout premium would push the deal toward $3 billion. James Dolan would need outside capital, almost certainly from the same sovereign-backed pool that just underwrote Yas Island. That is not impossible. It might even be the most likely combination on the board. (A dark horse here is Cosm, which was valued at USD $1 billion in a recent $250 million funding round.)

The buyer of last resort

The phrase “sovereign-backed entertainment investors” appears in almost every analyst note this week and is doing a lot of work. PIF, Mubadala, ADQ, and QIA have all been writing entertainment cheques. None of them needs a Hollywood operating thesis to justify owning a global premium-cinema brand. If a strategic buyer cannot get to a number, a sovereign vehicle (possibly in partnership with Sphere, possibly alone) is the structurally cleanest exit. Unless the Strait of Hormuz remains closed much longer.

Why this question does not go away

Even if these talks lead nowhere (and IMAX has been transparent that they may not), the underlying question is now permanent. The CEO succession is unresolved. The business is at peak operating performance: a record $1.28 billion at the 2025 global box office, a path to $1.4 billion in 2026 with Dune: Part Three, The Odyssey, and Mandalorian and Grogu, and a premium-format share that has roughly doubled since 2019. You sell into strength, not weakness. Wall Street knows this, the board knows this, and Rich Gelfond signalled in December that he knows it too.

The interesting question is no longer whether IMAX gets sold. It is whether the eventual buyer treats the four blue letters as a brand to protect, a technology to absorb, or a distribution network to repurpose. Each of those answers would reshape the premium-format market in a different direction, and would change what every operator who has an IMAX screen, or wants one, should be planning for next.