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Explainer

Is my IMAX a real IMAX?

“LieMAX” is an unfair name for a real problem. Every room here is a licensed IMAX — nobody is lying. But the badge covers rooms that differ enormously, and the ticket price often does not.

The complaint, stated precisely

The word usually means a multiplex auditorium retrofitted with IMAX branding and a digital projector, in a room not much larger than the screen next door. The original IMAX proposition was a purpose-built theatre with a screen tall enough to fill your vision and a 15/70mm projector to feed it. A retrofit can be a perfectly good cinema and still not be that.

Of the 1,384 IMAX screens we hold dimensions for, 157 are under 16 metres wide. For comparison, a decent non-premium multiplex screen is around 15 metres. That is the substance of the complaint.

The three things that actually differ

Frame shape. Only some rooms can show the full 1.43:1 IMAX frame. 112 can, out of 1,775 open IMAX screens. Everywhere else crops to 1.90 — about a quarter less picture, and the missing quarter is the part the director framed for.

Projector. 15/70mm film, GT dual laser, single-laser CoLa, or the older Digital Xenon — which IMAX sold for screens up to about 21 metres and which is visibly dimmer on anything larger.

Size. Not the screen, the lit picture. A big screen showing a letterboxed image is not a big picture, which is why we score the lit area rather than the fabric.

How to check yours in a minute

  1. 1. Search for your cinema. The page gives its measured dimensions, the projector, and how many independent sources back each.
  2. 2. Check the frame line. If it says 1.43 the room can show the full frame; if 1.90, it crops.
  3. 3. Check what is never lit. Where the fabric is much bigger than the picture, the page says so as a percentage.
  4. 4. Check the confidence badge. Some records rest on a single dated source, and we say so rather than implying precision we do not have.

What we will not do

We do not publish a “fake IMAX” list. The scoring model caps the bottom tier for rooms that fail the large-format premise on size — 169 rooms currently sit there — but that is a measurement, not an accusation, and a small IMAX with a laser projector can still be the best screen in its town.

The smallest rooms carrying the badge, by screen area, are a fair illustration:

The fair version of the complaint

Not “my IMAX is fake” but “I paid an IMAX surcharge for a room that does not do the thing IMAX is for.” That is checkable, and the point of this site is that you can check it before you pay rather than after.

1,775 IMAX screens open today, 1,384 with measured dimensions · data reconciled 2026-09-21 · The five kinds of IMAX