Guiyang IMAX GT Cinema Brought To Life By Ne Zha 2

(Qu Honglun/Getty Images)

IMAX is doubling down on 2025 being a blockbuster year

China’s “Ne Zha 2” animation is already breaking records for the company.

2/24/25 9:26AM

Christopher Nolan, the director behind “Oppenheimer” and “Interstellar,” became the first filmmaker to make a feature-length movie with several scenes shot in IMAX with 2008’s “The Dark Knight.” Now, 17 years and six Nolan movies later, it seems more people are catching up with the auteur’s obsession with the format.

Think big

Last Friday, IMAX’s chief exec, Richard Gelfond, reiterated the company’s $1.2 billion target for Imax box office takings in 2025, describing the year’s upcoming release schedule as an “embarrassment of riches,” with a record 14 movies in this year’s “filmed for IMAX” program.

The good news for cinephiles who want to pay a little more to immerse themselves in the largest, clearest pictures in history, or “3-D without the glasses,” as Nolan puts it? There are more places to do so than ever.

According to IMAX’s latest annual report, there were a record 1,807 locations with IMAX systems around the world at the end of 2024, 96% of which were commercial multiplexes. Interestingly, Greater China made up a whopping 45% share of IMAX systems last year, making it the company’s biggest region by far.

That’s already working well for IMAX into 2025. The CEO of the company behind the family of products — which includes high-res cameras capable of handling larger film formats, and the projectors and tech to screen the results across theaters around the world — singled out the recent success of “Ne Zha 2.” The Chinese megahit is the highest-grossing animation in history, with almost $1.9 billion at the time of writing, having demolished the previous IMAX animation record haul set by “The Polar Express” over 20 years ago.

Millie Giles

INVISIBLE INK

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Paramount and Microsoft’s Activision agree to partner on a “Call of Duty” movie

Less than a month after forming, Paramount Skydance has landed another major piece of intellectual property. The studio said it’s signed a deal with Microsoft’s Activision to create a live-action “Call of Duty” film.

The competitive shooter is one of the most popular gaming franchises in the world and has been the US’s bestselling series for the past 16 years. The next title in the 22-year-old franchise, “Black Ops 7,” will debut in November.

Paramount, which closed its merger with Skydance in August, has had a summer of big deals. It acquired UFC broadcast rights in a $7.7 billion deal with TKO last month, following a $1.5 billion deal for “South Park” rights in July. The company also lured “Stranger Things” creators away from Netflix last month for a four-year film and TV development deal.

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“Blinding Lights” just officially hit 5 billion streams on Spotify

Over the weekend, The Weeknd’s biggest hit crossed over the impressive threshold, with Spotify marking the feat with an Instagram post that the artist shared to his story.

According to Spotify data collated by Kworb, the song now has a staggering 5,000,010,581 streams on the platform, and is racking up nearly 1.5 million streams each day at the time of writing.

Blinding Lights crosses 5 billion chart — Sherwood News

While Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” released about two years before “Blinding Lights,” looks like it’ll be the next song to hit the 5 billion boundary, “Starboy,” another song from The Weeknd, might not be too far behind.

Besides those two megahits, The Weeknd has 26 other songs that have been streamed more than 1 billion times on Spotify — more than any other artist on the platform.

The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” is about to hit 5 billion streams on Spotify