{"id":4030,"date":"2026-05-25T20:12:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T20:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=4030"},"modified":"2026-05-25T20:12:54","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T20:12:54","slug":"wedbush-analyst-has-bold-imax-stock-message-for-investors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=4030","title":{"rendered":"Wedbush analyst has bold IMAX stock message for investors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p>IMAX Corporation (IMAX) shareholders had the kind of Friday that rewrites a year.<\/p>\n<p>Shares of the premium cinema technology company jumped about 15% on May 22, closing at $39.12, after The Wall Street Journal reported the company is exploring a sale and has approached entertainment companies as potential buyers.<\/p>\n<p>The move erased IMAX&#8217;s year-to-date losses in a single session.<\/p>\n<p>It also forced Wall Street to do something it usually avoids on a Friday: rethink an entire thesis before the weekend.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s where Wedbush analyst Alicia Reese came in.<\/p>\n<h2>Wedbush&#8217;s pick of the most likely IMAX buyers narrows the field fast<\/h2>\n<p>Reese named four buckets of likely buyers in her note to clients: private equity, Netflix (NFLX), Apple (AAPL), and Sony Group (SONY), according to CNBC.<\/p>\n<p>She kept her outperform rating and $46 price target on the stock.<\/p>\n<p>What stood out was <strong>who she left off the list: <\/strong>the major Hollywood studios.<\/p>\n<p><strong>More Entertainment Stocks:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Morgan Stanley resets Spotify stock price target<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Netflix price surge signals the end of the passive subscriber era<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Disney parks send strong message on U.S. consumers<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Her reasoning is practical. IMAX&#8217;s value depends on staying neutral. Studios fight each other for premium IMAX release slots, so a studio owner would compromise that neutrality and shrink the platform&#8217;s worth to competitors.<\/p>\n<p>That logic also explains why Reese flagged private equity first. As she put it, &#8220;PE ownership avoids the platform conflict issue entirely, as it would have no competing interest.&#8221;<\/p>\n<figure>\n<p>                        <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thestreet.com\/.image\/NDA6MDAwMDAwMDAzMDUzMjgy\/photo-3053282.jpg?profile=rss\" height=\"675\" width=\"1013\"><figcaption>The premium-screen business has quietly outgrown the broader box office, and one analyst&#8217;s note explains exactly which companies stand to benefit most from owning it.<\/p>\n<p>Bloomberg &amp;sol; Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h2>Why Apple, Netflix, and Sony each fit the IMAX deal differently<\/h2>\n<p><strong>The three corporate names on Reese&#8217;s list<\/strong> each fit for different reasons.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Apple:<\/strong> Buying IMAX would be a &#8220;rounding error against Apple&#8217;s balance sheet,&#8221; Reese wrote, and a useful theatrical platform for Apple TV+&#8217;s prestige content push.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Netflix:<\/strong> Its theatrical slate is thin enough that owning IMAX would not lock rival studios out of the format, removing the antitrust-style conflict that disqualifies most studios.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Sony:<\/strong> It has no streaming platform of its own and relies on theatrical box office in a structurally different way than its peers. Sony also already builds many of the cameras used to shoot IMAX-format films.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Benchmark&#8217;s Mike Hickey took a wider view, raising his price target to $60 from $44 and adding Amazon, Disney, Comcast, and Sphere Entertainment to the possible buyer list, as reported by Invezz.<\/p>\n<h2>IMAX&#8217;s recent numbers explain why the bidding could be serious<\/h2>\n<p>This is not a fading business looking for an exit.<\/p>\n<p>IMAX said it delivered its <strong>strongest year ever in 2025<\/strong>, According to Benzinga, with a record global box office, 166 new or upgraded system signings, and 160 installations.<\/p>\n<p>Its share of the U.S. and Canadian box office climbed to 5.2% last year from 3.2% in 2019.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><strong>Related: Wedbush sends blunt message on Elon Musk&#8217;s Tesla and Intel deal<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Premium large-format screens, IMAX included, reached 16% of domestic ticket sales through early April, up from 13% in the same period of 2021, per MarketWatch.<\/p>\n<p>First-quarter revenue came in at $81.4 million, down 6% year over year but ahead of the $80.28 million LSEG analyst estimate.<\/p>\n<p>The company is still guiding to a record $1.4 billion in global box office for full-year 2026.<\/p>\n<h3>The case against the IMAX takeover thesis is worth reading, too<\/h3>\n<p>Not everyone on the Street agrees a deal gets done at all.<\/p>\n<p>Texas Capital Securities analyst Eric Wold told clients in a Thursday, May 21, note that he would be &#8220;surprised if any of the major Hollywood studios&#8221; pursued IMAX, given the fight for IMAX release windows.<\/p>\n<p>Wold expects 2026 revenue of $448 million for IMAX and reiterated a $53 price target as a standalone.<\/p>\n<p>Rosenblatt&#8217;s Steve Frankel argued in a separate note that investor value is best preserved if IMAX simply stays public.<\/p>\n<h3>What IMAX stockholders should watch from here<\/h3>\n<p>For readers holding or eyeing IMAX, three things matter more than buyer speculation:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Deal versus no deal floor<\/strong>: Reese suggested takeover scenarios could set a new floor in the high $30s to low $40s. That floor goes away if talks die.<\/li>\n<li><strong>CEO signaling<\/strong>: IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond told the December investor day audience IMAX is &#8220;incredibly valuable&#8221; either as a standalone entity or inside a larger company, CNBC reported. This leaves the door open without forcing a transaction.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Premium share gains<\/strong>: If IMAX&#8217;s box office share keeps climbing, the standalone thesis still works, even without a buyer.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Apple&#8217;s services push, Netflix&#8217;s theatrical event strategy, and Sony&#8217;s hardware-plus-content model all have credible reasons to bid.<\/p>\n<p>The risk is that none of them blink. The Wall Street Journal said the process is early and may not lead to a deal.<\/p>\n<p>In that case, Friday&#8217;s 15% pop becomes the ceiling, not the floor.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><strong>Related: Wedbush resets Oracle stock price target for the rest of 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>#Wedbush #analyst #bold #IMAX #stock #message #investors<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>IMAX Corporation (IMAX) shareholders had the kind of Friday that rewrites a year. Shares of the premium cinema technology company jumped about 15% on May 22, closing at $39.12, after&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[246],"tags":[4810,1476,6349,92,267,91,264],"class_list":["post-4030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-popular","tag-analyst","tag-bold","tag-imax","tag-investors","tag-message","tag-stock","tag-wedbush"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}