Japan

There are 170 premium screens in Japan, across IMAX, Dolby Cinema, TOHO Cinemas TCX and Aeon Cinema ULTIRA. The biggest picture is at Kagoshima Municipal Science Center — 623 m² of lit screen, 33% more than the next room.

3 rooms can show the full 1.43:1 IMAX frame, which is the thing worth travelling for if a film was shot with IMAX cameras. The rest crop to 1.90.

Worth knowing before you book: Aeon Cinema Haruhi - ULTIRA never lights 24% of its screen. The fabric is bigger than the picture, which is why the ranking here is by lit area rather than by the dimensions cinemas advertise.

One of these is a dome, scored on projected surface area — not a like-for-like comparison with a flat screen, and noted as such on the pages.

43 of 170 publish their dimensions; the rest are scored on an estimate and marked as such. 8 of 170 have a projector confirmed by two independent sources. One room is digital with the generation never established — we say so rather than guessing which laser it is.