At CJ 4DPLEX, the Profit Is in the Format, Not the Seats

The new Liberty Township theater in Ohio is not the story, even though the ribbon was theirs. B&B Theatres just opened the first 4DX auditorium in the state — the multisensory seats that move, blow wind, and spray mist at the screen — alongside Ohio's largest SCREENX, the 270-degree panoramic format built on a 57-foot screen with 198 recliners and, in a North American first, Dolby Atmos sound. B&B is the fifth-largest cinema chain in America, family-owned since 1924, and this adds its 14th SCREENX and second 4DX to a relationship with the format supplier that began in 2018. The screens are real, and the press release is glowing.

The part worth an investor's time is who is behind them. CJ 4DPLEX is not a theater operator. It is the premium-format subsidiary of CJ CGV, South Korea's largest cinema chain — and the same parent that spent fifteen years failing to make money actually owning American movie theaters, closing its last U.S. multiplex in Los Angeles in September 2025. So you now have a single enterprise that could not earn a return running cinemas in America, quietly becoming the company other theater chains hand their biggest, most expensive rooms to. That gap is the whole article.

The money was never in the seats

Understanding this requires dropping the instinct that a cinema company profits by selling tickets. CJ 4DPLEX's model is closer to IMAX's than to a multiplex's. The theater chain bears the real estate, the building, and the installation cost. CJ supplies the projection technology and, just as importantly, the pipeline of Hollywood releases cut for it — a "Shot for SCREENX" program where studios reshape footage for the format on purpose. In exchange, CJ takes a slice of the premium ticket price. No box office risk, no renting, no staffing, no real estate. The downside of a bad movie is the exhibitor's problem; CJ still gets its royalty from whatever people pay for.

That is why a company that gave up on operating U.S. theaters is still very much in the U.S. screen business. It is not competing for cinema revenue; it is licensing the upgrade that keeps premium rooms differentiated. B&B's repeat business is the tell — a partnership that began in 2018 has now produced 14 SCREENX rooms and a second 4DX, so the host keeps finding the economics work, with 15 premium auditoriums in the chain's portfolio bearing CJ's formats. The studios have noticed too: this summer's "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" notched a record $31 million global opening for the formats.

The subsidiary is now the profit center

The inversion shows up in the parent's own books. CJ CGV reported consolidated operating profit of 11.5 billion won for the second quarter of 2026. Of that, the CJ 4DPLEX subsidiary alone accounted for 8.3 billion won — up 261% year over year. Do the division: the unit that owns no theaters generated roughly seven of every ten won of operating profit the whole company made. The theater parent's purpose has quietly inverted into being the holding shell for a format-royalty engine.

The U.S. numbers support the same direction. SCREENX took in $31.8 million at the domestic box office in the first half of 2026, up 55% from a year earlier; combined with 4DX the formats drew about $70 million, up 26%. That growth is coming from more than screens at work — CJ added 20 domestic SCREENX locations in the first half of 2026 through Cinemark, AMC, Apple Cinemas, and Cinema West, and expects more than 50 new U.S. locations for the full year, its largest domestic expansion ever. This is a licensing business compounding by adding royalty streams onto other people's assets.

The awkward truth for a U.S. investor

Here is the wrinkle the strong numbers cannot smooth over. A U.S. retail investor has no clean way to own this. The pure-play version of the format-royalty model that trades here is IMAX, and the market already knows it — IMAX is up about 40% this year and trades around 25 times trailing EBITDA and nearly seven times sales, a premium the market pays precisely because it is the clean, asset-light story.

The CJ version of that model sits buried inside a Korean-listed exhibitor whose core business is the very thing CJ 4DPLEX is paid to bypass. Every won of format profit is consolidated with the heavy theater operations, the weak domestic exhibition, and the leverage that fifteen years of running multiplexes built up. The attractive economics are real and measurable — the 260% profit growth, the seven-of-ten share — but the wrapper bundles the growth engine with the structurally challenged business it exists to escape.

That, not the Ohio screens, is the investment takeaway. The market is right to reward the clean version of this licensing franchise in a stock like IMAX. It has not been asked to reward it on its own inside CJ CGV, because there it cannot be bought separately. For the reader weighing whether this opening changes anything: the format business is legitimately compounding, but unless you want to own the Korean parent on its own considerable terms, there is no thesis here that the price has mispriced — only a good business whose packaging is the whole problem.