IMAX's First Permanent Theatre

Our Ontario Place guide covers the site's arc from 1970s showpiece to contested modern redevelopment. One detail deserves its own page: the Cinesphere sitting on those grounds holds a genuine world-first.

Invented at Expo 67, refined afterward

IMAX traces back to Multiscreen Corporation, formed by Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor and Robert Kerr in 1967 after their work on large- and multi-screen film experiments at Montreal's Expo 67 — where multi-projector setups kept falling out of sync and distracting audiences rather than immersing them. Along with engineer William Shaw, they developed a single-projector system using 70mm film run horizontally, producing an image nine times larger than standard 35mm film. The name IMAX, short for "maximum image," was reportedly sketched out on a restaurant placemat.

The first permanent theatre: Ontario Place, 1971

The technology's first permanent home wasn't in Montreal — it opened in 1971 inside the Cinesphere at Toronto's newly built Ontario Place, making it the first permanent IMAX theatre anywhere in the world. The distinctive geodesic-domed Cinesphere became as much a symbol of Ontario Place's futurist design as any other structure on the site.

A format that spread everywhere

From that single Toronto theatre, IMAX grew into a global cinema format found in shopping malls, science centres and multiplexes worldwide — but the Cinesphere remains the format's literal point of origin as a permanent, commercially operating theatre, a fact easy to miss next to Ontario Place's more contested modern headlines.

Sources

• Build Canada — IMAX Founders: The Small-Town Visionaries Who Made Cinema Bigger Than Life Itself
• The Canadian Encyclopedia — IMAX Systems Corporation
• Wikipedia — IMAX Corporation