Filmhouse Cinemas and New York-based entertainment technology company, IMAX Corporation, have announced an agreement to launch Nigeria’s first IMAX theatre.
Announcing the deal, Kene Mkparu, head of Filmhouse Cinemas said it is in line with the company’s mission.
“Our mission is to establish the best movie-going experience in Nigeria. IMAX will help us realise this goal by delivering an immersive and differentiated experience previously unavailable to Nigerian moviegoers,” he said.
IMAX is a motion picture film format and a set of cinema projection standards created by the Canadian company IMAX Corporation and developed by Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor, Robert Kerr, and William C. Shaw. IMAX has the capacity to record and display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film systems. Since 2002, some feature films have been converted (or upgraded) into IMAX format for display in IMAX theatres and some have also been partially shot in IMAX.
IMAX is the most widely used system for special-venue film presentations. As of Dec. 31, 2014, there were 934 IMAX theatres in 62 countries.
Quoting recent reports which estimate that Nigeria’s entertainment and media revenues will reach an estimated N1.6 trillion ($8.5 billion) by 2018 – more than doubling from 2013, IMAX, EMEA president, Andrew Cripps, said: “We are delighted to join forces with Filmhouse Cinemas and enter Nigeria, which represents a key strategic move for our expansion in Africa.”
“As the biggest economy on the continent and a market that is extremely under-screened, we believe that together with Filmhouse we can seize the mutual growth opportunities that exist in Nigeria and bring the world’s most immersive cinematic experience to more audiences across the country.”
