IMAX: You Pay Your Money, But Do You Take Your Chances?

Aziz Ansari: If this man tells you he has 25,000 Twitter followers, you should believe him. Michael Buckner/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

Comedian Aziz Ansari (who plays the odious Tom on NBC's Parks And Recreation) went to see Star Trek at an advertised IMAX theater this weekend. When he discovered that it wasn't the giant screen that he (and, I dare say, many people if not most people) associate with the term "IMAX," but merely a regular-sized screen that was "IMAX" only in that it had improved digital sound and picture quality, he got angry.

According to his account of the incident (which is filled with profanity from the title forward, so be warned), Ansari went to customer service after the movie and asked for his five dollars back -- not the entire price of his ticket, but the premium he paid to see it in IMAX, on the basis that he didn't get what he thought he was getting. He was refused.

He says he even warned the manager that he had 25,000 Twitter followers, and that if the theater wasn't willing to refund his five bucks, he'd explain his side of the story to them. Which he did, on Monday evening.

And by late Tuesday, the CEO of IMAX had been prodded to defend the smaller IMAX screens in a statement in which he claimed, in effect, that nobody except Aziz Ansari cares how big an IMAX screen is, and that nobody is paying those five dollars because they necessarily assume that IMAX means a large screen.

If that's the case, it's a bad break for them that the only guy in the country to feel ripped off happens to have an extremely popular Twitter stream.

How not to respond to a social media firestorm, after the jump...

What's odd is that, based on the company's statement, it's impossible and will remain impossible to tell what kind of IMAX screen -- traditional or newfangled -- you're going to get, and they feel no obligation to tell you or make it possible for you to find out.

Ansari is far from the first person to raise this issue: the LF Examiner, the "independent journal of the large format motion picture industry," ran a skeptical editorial last October as the new IMAX screens were being rolled out, speculating that precisely Ansari's reaction would result: customers who thought they were getting a large screen wouldn't get one, and would be angry.

Throwing around your number of Twitter followers is a maneuver of highly questionable wisdom and class (it's effectively the "Do you know who I am?" of the Internet), but it's surprising that IMAX's response is to insist that it will decide what the term "IMAX" means, and if customers get something other than what they genuinely thought they were getting, that's...their tough luck?

Ultimately, if there's a disconnect between what people who head to an IMAX theater are expecting and what they see when they get there, that would seem to be a problem, and social media is a very good way to find out whether that's the case. If indeed IMAX is so confident that people will be fully satisfied with the "IMAX Digital" experience (that's the far smaller screen), why not add an easy way to go to the IMAX site and find out whether your local theater is traditional IMAX or IMAX Digital? If nobody will care, it won't hurt.

This is exactly the kind of thing that can get out of hand in a hurry in the age in which we live: there is already a site called LIEMAX that uses a Google Maps mashup to identify IMAX theaters are either "real" or "fake," based on whether they have the large screens.

While the company may not have wanted to brand the smaller screens as "IMAX Digital," it would be worse if they became widely known as "Liemax."