Chicago’s tallest movie screen is likely gone for good. Here’s what’s left (plenty, actually) for filmgoers who’d rather go big than stay home

I close my eyes, and think of Vin Diesel’s big ol’ head.

It’s the only thing I remember from the movie “Bloodshot,” and from what was likely my final visit to the Navy Pier IMAX theater, 13 months ago.

Operated most recently by AMC Theatres, it’s closed now. Probably for good, if another multiplex brand such as Cinemark (which recently bailed on the downtown Evanston 18-screen Century complex) doesn’t take it over.

For two- or three-thousand fellow Chicagoans, the abbreviated March 2020 engagement of “Bloodshot” marked their last time sitting in the Navy Pier IMAX auditorium, flattened by the decibels and the big wow of the screen. This was before everything closed down

“Bloodshot” was pretty lame. The Navy Pier IMAX screen’s dimensions? Not lame. Sixty feet high. Eighty-six feet wide. This was the sole, “true” IMAX auditorium within the city limits. And when Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” played there, or when a new “Mission: Impossible” played there, it played there.

Last month, as reported in the Tribune, AMC Theatres called it quits on the 300-seat Navy Pier IMAX as part of a chain-wide, cost-cutting move spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“That’s a big loss for Chicago,” said Music Box Theatre general manager Ryan Oestreich, whose Lakeview theater, in non-pandemic years, hosts the annual Music Box 70 Millimeter Film Festival.

“Even the lousy films I saw there had a tinge of magic,” posted rogerebert.com assistant editor Matt Fagerholm on Facebook recently. He cited the live-action “Beauty and the Beast”; I’ll see his “Beauty and the Beast” and raise him a “Bloodshot.”

Future prospects for the IMAX auditorium remain in flux.

Navy Pier communications director Payal Patel notes that the Pier is “currently working with AMC to transition their operations out of the IMAX space, and will begin exploring new opportunities for that space in the coming months. The Pier is opening to all possibilities at this time, including other theater operators.”

So far, Patel confirmed Monday, “there are no theater operators on the table right now.”

It’s likely the space will be turned over to a ride or an attraction, unrelated to moviegoing.

We’ve heard this before, and not just in moviegoing. The Tribune recently reported on the repurposing of Lakeview’s four-auditorium theatrical mainstay Stage 773, to accommodate what executive director Jill Valentine called a ”Willy Wonka meets Burning Man meets the Museum of Modern Art immersive experience.” Beyond hot chocolate flung against a white wall, with a frame around it, I’m not sure what that means. We’ll see!

We’re already sharing a massive, immersive experience. It’s called a COVID-19 outbreak, with variants.

Where does the closing of the Navy Pier IMAX leave presumably vaccinated audiences eager to immerse themselves in something else, something with superheroics or Vin Diesel’s head on a screen they can’t get at home?

There are options. According to an IMAX spokesperson, 12 Chicago area theaters featuring the IMAX technology (if not the size and impact of the Navy PIer IMAX screen), remain either open or soon to reopen. The screens are located in multiplexes in Hodgkins, Lombard, Naperville, New Lenox, Niles, Oak Brook, Schaumburg, Skokie, South Barrington, Woodridge, Bloomington and, in Chicago, not far from where I live and where I saw “Snakes on a Plane,” the Regal City North.

This Thursday, one of the area’s great movie palaces, the 1928-built Tivoli in downtown Downers Grove, reopens with “Godzilla vs. Kong” on the larger of its two screens, a full 40 feet in width, and “Raya and the Last Dragon” in the smaller venue.

Another beaut, the Music Box Theatre, built a year after the Tivoli, continues its in-person screenings after a year of enterprising pandemic management.

As with nearly every aspect of arts, culture, entertainment and the nerve-wracked leisure economies, the pandemic has hastened all kinds of audience habits. With film, it’s moviestaying vs. moviegoing. The studios and distributors, increasingly shipping their marquee attractions straight to home viewing in tandem with theatrical releases, are either being pragmatic or heartless, depending on where your sympathies lie. For communal indoor moviegoing, your sympathies go both ways: with the people who make and distribute the films, and with the exhibitors who are in such rough shape right now.

For context, I’m somewhere in the neighborhood of Dr. Anthony Fauci, get-back-out-there-wise. Unneeded risk sounds pretty stupid and profoundly selfish to me now. Especially after the year our family has been through. I happily take enough risks on the job I probably wouldn’t take otherwise. It’s the job, and I haven’t done that job in a way that remotely resembles how my colleagues in Los Angeles or New York have done it. So maybe I’m not really in Dr. Fauci’s neighborhood. Maybe my definition of risk is a lot riskier than yours.

Last year, according to the Motion Picture Association, U.S. and Canadian box office revenue was down 80%. AMC Theatres lost $4.6 billion in 2020. It has been a terrible year in so many ways.

Meantime, civilians and critics, date-night viewers and arts journalists alike swim against the tide of endless streaming options. All I had to do was type that previous sentence, and my brain was thinking: When can you borrow time later today to finish the terrific HBO four-parter “Exterminate All the Brutes”?

Going to a theater, especially a tall-screen whammy such as the Navy Pier IMAX, takes you away from that endless menu of options for a couple of hours. It’s just you, in a crowd, getting clobbered by an egg-headed action star or Tom Cruise, running, and ideally by a filmmaker who knows how to exploit the true IMAX dimensions for maximum wow.

I love the wow. It’s why I love the Music Box’s 70MM film festival. It’s why, as a five-year-old, I sat in the first row of the Venetian Theatre in my hometown, Racine, Wisconsin, long since demolished, watching John Frankenheimer’s “Grand Prix,” thereby ruining my patience for conventional speed limits for life.

There are still places Chicago moviegoers can get that wow. First, and right now, as a society, we get healthy and mask up. We grow comfortable with the idea of masking up indefinitely. And then?

Let the wows flourish, on the other side of life as we’ve known it since “Bloodshot” at the Navy Pier IMAX. Let the wows find their rightful place in every art form we know and love. Including the movies.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune

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