by L.A. Mood Comics and Games

By Dan Brown

Now that fall has arrived, the question can be asked: Who, or what, had the best summer this year in the entertainment industry?

Was it Ella Langley, who’s ubiquitous number Choosin’ Texas was clearly the song of the season?

Was it the suffix “-maxxing,” which got added to virtually every noun and verb in the English language during the warmer months?

Was it Tomdaya, the celeb couple du jour who seemingly appeared on every red carpet on Earth?

Nope, it was none of these.

The hottest summer personality/event/trend/franchise was . . . IMAX.

Out of all the people and things that make up the entertainment business, the one that had a better summer than anyone or anything else was a formerly obscure film format that has transcended its weird origins – this summer, it moved to the centre of the cultural conversation.

If you didn’t know what IMAX was before this summer, by the end you may have been an expert.

That’s thanks largely to two summer releases, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Just look at the numbers. 

Of the more than $1.7 billion dollars The Odyssey has grossed since it was released on July 17, $521 million of that amount has come from the sale of IMAX tickets – which makes it the highest-grossing IMAX movie ever, higher even than Avatar.

Of the $360 million that Brand New Day pulled in on its opening weekend at the end of July, fully 24 per cent came from IMAX and other PLFs (premium large formats).

It’s fair to say more people paid more money to see films in IMAX this summer than ever before.

This column won’t go into the technical specifics of IMAX, except to note that Nolan had to have a special camera built to realize his dream of adapting Homer’s epic. Nolan has been working his way toward filming an entire movie in IMAX, previously filming select sequences in movies such as The Dark Knight Rises.

IMAX has been around for decades, but it went mainstream in 2026, along with other premium formats. For a long time IMAX seemed like a curiousity that was limited to nature documentaries and the NASA space shuttle. There have even been moments when the company’s future was in doubt.

It has met its moment. 

And you can bet, come awards season, IMAX will be getting thanked in multiple acceptance speeches.

Why the mass appeal? The explanation may be as simple as, there are now entire generations who grew up watching motion pictures on their laptops and cellphones. Those movie lovers are hungering for as big a picture as possible, and IMAX is a revelation to them. 

The big brains in Hollywood have been trying new ways to get people back into movie houses. 3D movies were a thing for a while, but then the studios got so desperate, they even tried guilting people into watching movies in the theatre. 

Even before COVID-19, movie fans were shifting away from the traditional movie-watching experience. Now theatres are back, in a big way. And there is a hunger like never before for specialized formats. 

You might even say movie fans were IMAX-maxxing all summer long.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.