Richard Gelfond
Analyst · Roth Capital Partners
Well, I think, Rich, what I said was we’re going to test it, and that’s pretty easy. We’ve talked to a number of -- a handful of exhibitors, and there is interest. And I think what we’ll do is we’ll put in there a second screen in a multiplex. When you have a film like The Dark Night opens, which is going to clearly open very strongly, you could open the thing simultaneously in both screens, and I think you’d expect very strong results.
I think it’s also interesting when you have a situation like now, where we have Avengers for one week and then it carries over in a limited number of theaters. And then we go into Dark Shadows, where one screen could play Avengers, continue to play it, and the other screen would be able to play Dark Shadows.
When you look at our business where a majority of the revenue comes from only 4 or 5 blockbuster titles a year, you could see being able to utilize the second screen in a very effective way. I think what we would do with the exhibitors, Rich, would be, we’d say that, if the screen isn’t performing after an IMAX opening, which is most likely in sort of the shoulder period, then you would let them go to alternative programming. But the reaction I’ve gotten from exhibitors so far is kind of, "Well, this sounds like a win-win situation. Let’s give it a try and let’s see how it works in the real world."
And as I’ve said to you at other times, I wasn’t for it years ago because I felt that our brand wasn’t strong enough, or we didn’t have enough film product to deal with it, and I was concerned about lower IRRs. Now since our IRRs in our existing network are about 60%, I’m not counting the film side. If we end up getting IRRs in the 30% range, that’s still pretty acceptable and a still pretty good return. So I think we can create a win-win.