So one of the few ways in which Toronto surpasses Vancouver (and pay attention, because you know there aren’t many 🙂 ) is that in Toronto, Cineplex apparently understands that people in the core city might want to see movies in IMAX without trekking all the way to the outer boondocks of the GTA. To that end, there’s an IMAX screen at Scotiabank Toronto, which is very centrally located and easy to get to by transit. (There’s also the fact that the AMC 24, which is even more easily accessible by transit than the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto, recently converted one of its screens to IMAX, although really it’s IMAX-Lite and not full-on IMAX like at the Scotiabank.)
In contrast, in Vancouver, the only two IMAX screens around (which both belong to Cineplex) are in such transit-friendly destinations as southern middle-of-nowhere Richmond and Langley, which transit-wise (and centrality-wise) might as well be in Alberta. The Richmond screen, at least, is somewhat transit-accessible in that it only takes about an hour to get to via transit from Vancouver. The Langley screen takes a full TWO HOURS to get to via transit, so a four-hour round trip.
I’m not shitting you: here’s the proof!
(Here’s the transit trip to SilverCity Riverport for comparison.)
And where, you might ask, are they (re)opening only the most popular movie of the last 2 or 3 decades in IMAX, which is to say Titanic? Oh yes, you guessed it! Langley!
And to add insult to injury, Cineplex is building a new multiplex in Vancouver, right on a rapid transit line (the Canada Line) and are they putting in an IMAX screen? That’s right, you guessed it again: NO!
I suspect this is because they want to promote their new subpar format, UltraAVX, which—unlike IMAX, which they have to pay to license—they own and so keep all of the profits it generates. And they’ve obviously set up UltraAVX to compete with IMAX. But UltraAVX is not even close to IMAX in terms of quality. The why of this insane decision, however, doesn’t really matter—what matters is that movie aficionados in Vancouver, West Vancouver, North Vancouver, and Burnaby who are environmentally conscious, who don’t have cars, and/or who don’t drive continue to be shafted by a lack of easy access to an IMAX movie experience. And Vancouver looks stupid in comparison to Toronto, which is never a good thing.