South Korea's food and entertainment conglomerate CJ Group is aiming to create more than 1,000 "ScreenX" screens worldwide by 2020, a top company official said Monday.

"We're going to make this year the starting year for ScreenX to rise as a key platform of movies," Choi Byung-hwan, head of the CJ 4DPLEX Co., told reporters in the company's Los Angeles office.

"Setting this year as an inflection point, we plan to apply the ScreenX system to more than 1,000 screens around the world by 2020."

The ScreenX multi-projection technology seeks to enhance audience immersion by projecting a wider image beyond the traditional rectangular white screen, utilizing both sides of the off-screen space in a theater.

CJ 4DPLEX is an affiliate of CJ CGV, South Korea's largest multiplex cinema chain.

CJ currently operates 76 ScreenX screens in 45 locations around the country.

"As the film industry has a history that is over 100 years, there are people who forecast the industry's decline. That's because many people enjoy contents at home thanks to the development of personal media. This made us agonize over ways to differentiate the cinema experience from what consumers can get at home, and we found a new way of enhancing the audience's immersion."

The ScreenX system officially made its international debut during CinemaCon 2015, a film industry fair held in Las Vegas in April. In the same month, CJ installed the ScreenX system at a Bangkok theater for the first time in the world.

One of the strong points of ScreenX is that it requires a small initial investment.

"ScreenX can be created by simply adding a few components (to existing theaters)," Choi said. "For theater owners, this is only a small financial investment."

The cinema chain will persuade more theater owners around the world to remodel their facilities into ones that show ScreenX films while focusing on transforming more acclaimed films into ScreenX format, he added. (Yonhap)