MacGillivray Freeman Films

MacGillivray Freeman Films is an American film studio based in Laguna Beach, California and founded in the mid-1960s by Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman. It has produced documentaries, feature films, and IMAX films.

In 2010, MacGillivray Freeman Films became the first documentary film producer to ever cross the $1 billion mark in gross box office. Concerned about conservation, it established the non-profit MacGillivray Freeman Films Educational Foundation and One World One Ocean.

MacGillivray has produced and directed more than 30 IMAX films and shot over 7 million feet of 70 mm film—the most in cinema history. He has also developed three cameras that work with the format: a high-speed (slow-motion) model, the industry’s first lightweight model and the “all-weather” camera he used while filming on Mt. Everest.

Founding partner Jim Freeman was killed in a helicopter crash in 1976, two days before the release of To Fly!

Prior to producing IMAX films, the company had success producing surfing documentaries, TV commercials and filming for Hollywood feature films. Its 1972 film Five Summer Stories is still considered a surfing classic.

In 1976, it produced Magic Rolling Board, a 10-minute documentary about skateboarding. The company has directed and photographed for Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount and Stanley Kubrick. The company was honored for its aerial cinematography when Jonathan Livingston Seagull was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Photography in 1973 and when The Towering Inferno received the Academy Award for Best Photography in 1974.

Most well known for its IMAX films, the studio has produced and distributed 35 IMAX films since 1974. Its first IMAX film To Fly!, produced for the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum, was later selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Film Registry.

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