What's going on at Auckland's iMax building?
A walk around a shambolic cinematic situation...
The carpet is worn, the signs are broken, the walls are dirty and many parts remain empty, littered and unused. After 21 years, Auckland’s iMax building is run down, looking less like a state-of-the-art theatre complex and more like an abandoned mall. On a recent Saturday night, I took a walk to find out what was going on. Let’s go…
Let’s start here, at the front entrance. If you stop and stand on these steps for long enough, your gaze will turn away from the cavernous concrete bunker beneath you and upwards towards an electronic sign.
It’s a typical digital display board showcasing movie names in red lettering. Look closer and you’ll see one of the movies on offer is Jojo Rabbit, a Taika Waititi film that came out in 2019 and is definitely not playing on any movie screens right now.
Neither is ‘Star Wars: Rise of S,’ which I’m assuming is Rise of Skywalker, JJ Abrams’ controversial finale to the latest Star Wars trilogy. It also came out in 2019, so it seems safe to assume that this was the year the sign stopped working properly.
Like much of the building we’re about to venture inside, it’s run down. Broken. Stuffed. In a state of disrepair. It. Doesn’t. Work.
I’m not the only one who’s noticed this. Here’s a recent tweet from Flight of the Conchords star Jemaine Clement, who’s a bit of a bigger deal than me…
Anyone who lives in Auckland, or visits regularly, knows what this is, and where we’re standing. We’re in the middle of Queen Street, next to Aotea Square, out front of the Sky World Metro Centre, home of Event Cinema’s one and only iMax theatre.
It’s where a mighty entertainment precinct once stood, one that used to hum with two million visitors a year. More than 12,000 people are estimated to walk past this broken sign every single day.
These days, it’s a hulking piece of architectural shame.
Opened in 2000 with great fanfare, that iMax cinema and everything surrounding it was lauded as Auckland’s biggest entertainment drawcard. It was massively popular.
On those same steps, look to your left and you’d see a rammed Burger King full of hungry students and, depending on the time of day, swaying drunks. On the right was a multi-level Borders book store, which had the best CD listening posts in town, and an incredible music biography selection. Starbucks was in the circular part on the corner, bustling with people drinking bad coffee.
Across the complex’s seven stories were all kinds of things: a busy bowling alley, a fizzing food court, a colourful kids’ maze, a mini-golf course, a visceral video game arcade, a criss-crossed network of escalators and sky paths, and a rocket ship elevator. The jewel in the crown was the cinema, which houses a gigantic four-story-high screen, the biggest in Australasia.
It was also home to New Zealand’s only Planet Hollywood bar and restaurant, where Christina Aguilera performed in 2001. I met my wife in the same place. On a Tuesday night, we bonded over student drink specials. Her friends asked me if I was Daniel Vettori, the Black Cap cricketer, and I never wore my glasses in public again.
Visiting this place felt like you were in a kind of wonderland, a sensory overload that sat somewhere between a Lewis Carroll novel and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth.
Sadly, this metal and silver space fantasy has not aged well. These days, it’s a grim epitaph to a bygone era, a maze of dead space, wonky bits, unused sections, abandoned stuff and just plain weirdness.
It’s like one of those confusing optical illusions stapled to the ceiling while you’re at the dentist getting a root canal. You can’t make sense of it. Your eyes and your brain won’t put it together.
Even David Bowie would struggle to get around it.
These days, it’s a shadow of its former self. It feels unused and unloved. The old Starbucks is padlocked shut. The former Burger King is empty and abandoned. Borders has become a Carl’s Jr that emits a sickly smell of grease onto the pavement outside.
Venture through those front doors and you’ll step into a sorry excuse of a food court that’s well past its prime. It seems to have about one-third occupancy, but it’s hard to tell. It might be even less.
The Saturday night I visit, nothing is open, and just one table is being used by a group of three people playing cards. TVNZ recently reported most stalls were were untenanted after Covid-19 lockdowns.
You can rent one for yourself, if you want to.
It’s pretty sad to see so few people in there on a Saturday night, because one major draw card remains open. A short flight up the escalators, or a quick climb up the spiral staircase, is Event Cinema Queen Street, the biggest movie complex in New Zealand, including Gold Class and iMax screens. “Films to the fullest” boasts the iMax website.
Right now it’s playing Godzilla vs Kong, which sounds like a great night out.
Not tonight though. Aside from cinema staff and a cleaner, the only other people I see in the 45 minutes I wander around the complex are Green MP Chloe Swarbrick with a friend, five people going into a Gold Class movie up top, and those card players downstairs.
You know what I did see? All kinds of weird shit.
Look at this:
And this:
This is strange too:
And this has always been weird:
No one can even agree on a damned name for the place. Depending on where you search on Google, it’s called the ‘Metro Centre,’ or the ‘Sky World Entertainment Centre,’ or ‘Sky World Indoor Entertainment.’ Google it, and you’ll find many just referring to the whole place as ‘Event Cinemas Queen Street’. Some, like me, just call it iMax, because that’s what’s plastered all over the outside in giant lettering.
Back when it opened, the complex had a tragic start when Sacred Heart College teenager Danial Gardner fell 14 metres onto a table in Borders and died. I can’t even comprehend something that horrific. “I felt (his trousers) through my hands,” a friend who tried to grab him told the Herald. “As I noticed Danial falling I quickly turned around and stuck my arm over the side and scraped it against the wall as I tried to grab hold of his trousers.”
Ever since, people have been fascinated by the place. When things happen there, they make headlines. The iMax screen was replaced in 2013, an operation that required the roof coming off and a delicate hovering helicopter operation. More recently, as John Campbell reported for Checkpoint in 2017, there were issues with its fire safety systems. It sounded worrying at the time, like the building’s days were numbered.
Wandering around it now, it certainly feels that way.
I feel icky putting the boot into a decaying complex after Covid-19 forced the entertainment industry to its knees. I’ve already written about how my favourite cinema, Event Cinemas Newmarket, has been closed since July, and shows no sign of re-opening. These days, many movies go straight onto streaming platforms, and theatres do not do well in pandemics.
The industry has a long, tough recovery ahead of it.
But what’s happening here seems like more than that. The building is so dated, the design so out of step with modern entertainment hubs. I don’t understand any of it: the future-metallic surfaces, the building-within-a-building thing, the permanent scaffolding, the unusable balconies, the bridge to nowhere, the jet engines on the ceiling, the endless spiral staircase that makes me dizzy. None of it makes any sense.
Did it ever?
Look at some of this stuff:
I wanted to talk to an architect about all of this. Were the designers on drugs when this fever dream of a building was devised? Why do I still get lost in the damned place after 21 years? I wanted to walk around it with someone who knows more about structural integrity than me, point out all the baffling aspects and ask: “Why’d they put that there?”
More importantly, I want to know what would need to happen to sort this place out. Is fixing it even possible?
I know three architects, none wanted to go on record. It turns out there’s a kind of architectural code of conduct: thou shall not critique another’s work. I respect that. But I also like a good story. So if there are any architects out there who would take a walk-and-talk with me, please get in touch. I’d be happy to do it anonymously, if you’d prefer.
In the meantime, it’s up to me to say how it is. In 2021, this building feels horribly aged, or, to borrow the closed mini-putt course’s name, Lost in Time. It’s a mess, an absolute clusterfuck of a place to visit. It desperately needs a revamp.
The only reason I go there, and I suspect many others as well, is because it has the biggest cinematic screen in New Zealand, and some movies look really fucking great on a really big screen. The Dark Knight was a magical experience. So was Gravity. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen less so, but that’s entirely my fault. It’s Michael Bay. I deserved that headache.
One thing remains kind of cool, though. It’s something that, no matter what happens to everything else around it, needs to survive. If the building closes, we should get this item to Te Papa so future generations can look at it, enjoy it, and remember what once was.
I’m talking, of course, about the rocket ship elevator. I use it every time I go there. I love it. My kids love it. It rules. You’re in a freaking rocket ship. Every time I’m in it, I think of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator and how it shoots through the roof and into the sky.
Perhaps this rocket ship can help lead the way and transport the building’s tenants into the future. Whatever happens, the rocket ship elevator needs to stay.
Great read. I moved up to Auckland from Christchurch a few months after the 2011 earthquakes and that building legitimately terrified me. The dizzying heights from the top, but it always felt so exposed with the route to the ground so easy to see.
The number of times I'd got lost in there, taking a stairwell I thought led somewhere else and ended up on a different floor, or taken that godforsaken bridge to nowhere.
As a near inner-city dweller, the iMax building was my closest cinema but I never really loved it and stopped going there unless necessary, especially after the building report stories.
Moved closer to the Event Newmarket (and Rialto Newmarket) a few years ago and don't think I've stepped foot in the IMax building since.
The Auckland inner-city deserves a quality blockbuster cinema, but this isn't it. I'd be looking to something like EntX in Christchurch as the way of the future. The current building is bizarrely futuristic, yet its a relic.
Hi Chris, how can I contact you? I can add alot of significant details to your story. Thanks