It’s Not a Movie. It’s an IMAX Experience.

IMAX has gone Hollywood. Once the super-sized film format was solely the province of endangered seals, museum-going families and nature/adventure enthusiasts. These days, blockbuster film fans, and even NASCAR devotees, can treat themselves to their own IMAX experience.

Six years ago, IMAX's corporate hierarchy re-imagined and then re-positioned the company's offerings: moving away from strictly educational fare, towards entertainment. Along the way, IMAX became a producer of 3D documentary films as well as an enabler. Its proprietary technology allows 35mm feature films to be sized upwards to IMAX's 15/70mm format. While the DMR (digital re-mastering) process is hi-tech - 35mm is converted to digital then output to IMAX- the on-screen results equal a big wow.

Studio blockbusters Star Wars: Episode II, Attack of the Clones and Apollo 13 were the first to benefit from IMAX's DMR up-conversion process. It took nine months to create those versions. These days, the transfer can be done in three weeks. Hence the concurrent release of blockbuster films like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Spider-Man 3 in theaters in both 35mm and IMAX.

And, yes, filmgoers pay more to see IMAX versions, but happily so, as tots to teens to recreational drug users have come to appreciate the format's "immersive" appeal. The screen is so large and angled in a particular way to fill in a moviegoer's peripheral vision. Visuals are sharper, clearer and magnified to an almost vertigo-inducing degree. The sound, at up to 14,000 watts, drowns out any possibility of independent thought; instead of just watching a film, you're in it.

That's because the IMAX film frame is 10 times the size of a standard film frame. The screen can be up to eight stories tall. And the projectors that fill those screens are hulking (think small closet-sized, with strips of film pulling in and out and lots of air-cooling tubes à la Terry Gilliam's Brazil). The six-channel digital surround-sound system is equally amp-ed, requiring 44 custom-designed speakers.

Moviegoing continues to face tough competition from not only other forms of entertainment but today's sophisticated home theater systems. An IMAX theatergoing experience, however, is in a different class. "You can't replicate the IMAX experience at home," contends Greg Foster, IMAX's CEO of Filmed Entertainment. "It's not possible; you can't get anywhere close to it."

That uniqueness is why the format has found favor with Hollywood. Filmmakers have embraced it. Batman Begins and, soon, The Dark Knight's Christopher Nolan has called IMAX "the ultimate form of cinema." Explains IMAX's Foster, "Visionary filmmakers want their movies to be seen in the best possible light by consumers, and there's no better presentation that exists that's near the quality of IMAX."

The executive is personally happiest when the company works again with filmmakers such as the Wachowski Brothers, who approved the IMAX treatment for The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions and V for Vendetta. The third, fourth and now fifth Harry Potter filmmakers have been on board. Tom Hanks has worked on five IMAX projects in the last four years on both the entertainment and documentary side, with an upcoming documentary on baseball in the works. Foster attributes this loyalty to the company's approach. "We don't play God; we enhance what the filmmaker wants us to do," he explains. "We ask, ‘How did you design the movie? What works for you?' That's part of the user friendliness that's contributed to our repeat business with filmmakers," he says.

Distribution executives value IMAX because, for a relatively small expense, the system has essentially created a new lucrative distribution window. Polar Express first made studio execs take notice. IMAX's 3D version earned $60 million - 20 percent of the film's business on one percent of its screens. The R-rated 300: The IMAX Experience screened on only 62 theaters its first weekend of release, averaging a record $58,000 per screen (compared to $22,000 for conventional theaters). Over the film's second weekend, IMAX earned six percent of the film's ticket sales on two percent of its screens. By the summer of 2007, the 20 IMAX-converted movies had grossed more than $300 million.

Most of the studio films picked by IMAX, with the glaring exception of Poseidon, have been home runs. Films heavy on CG and visual effects, like 300, The Ant Bully and Open Season, seem to work best visually with the mega-presentation. And the institutional business has not gone away. To date, the most successful film from the company is 1985's The Dream is Alive, which has grossed $150,000,000. And because IMAX's documentaries are evergreen in theme, from the deep sea to outer space, a film's theatrical life is also long-lived.

The company continues to innovate. Foster predicts that toward the end of 2008 or in early 2009, IMAX will roll out digital IMAX projectors - which means the physical 15/70mm print will be gone but not the onscreen experience. Additionally, IMAX's MPX technology allows it to retrofit auditoriums in multi-screen complexes, converting them to IMAX theaters. Currently there are more than 266 IMAX theaters worldwide; 115 of those are IMAX 3D. More than 50 new theaters are in the planning stages. And while there won't ever be an IMAX screen on every street corner or in every multiplex, every true event-movie creator will want their film to screen on IMAX. And every real movie fan will want to see it there.