Demand is high to see Christopher Nolan's fantasy epic The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm, but there's a good reason behind why the sessions are so limited. The Odyssey is a blockbuster adaptation of Homer's ancient poem, depicting the Trojan War hero Odysseus on a turbulent journey home to Ithaca. Nolan's new film is the first movie ever captured entirely on IMAX 70mm film stock, and that rare feat has also made it even harder to see in the intended format.
There are only a handful of cinemas worldwide capable of projecting 70mm IMAX, which significantly limits the number of showtimes audiences can see Nolan's film in this format. As it turns out, there are several key reasons why theaters cannot simply add more IMAX 70mm screenings of The Odyssey.
IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond shared with Variety at the premiere of The Odyssey that he and the team recognize that "there's certainly more demand" for audiences to see the film in these theaters. The issue with providing more availability, according to Gelfond, is that "they haven’t made new IMAX film projectors in about 50 years."
"There’s certainly more demand. The problem is they haven’t made new Imax film projectors in about 50 years. So we retrofit them, rebuild them and part of our strategy is to see how far we can take it."
When asked why they can't construct more of these projects, Gelfond said "it's not practical," meaning they have to "find them" out in the wild and "retrofit them and rebuild them":
"We build new projectors every day, but film projectors using this film, it's not practical. So we've got to find them, we've got to retrofit them and rebuild them, which is what we did for The Odyssey."
Another preventative is that the blueprints for these 70mm IMAX projectors "no longer exist," sources at IMAX told Variety. This means IMAX itself no longer has the capability to produce more IMAX 70mm cameras, and given that the first projector was designed in 1970, there are very few working engineers today who can understand or replicate the required systems. Tragically, a lack of proper recordkeeping has led to the IMAX 70mm projector becoming a lost art.
This limits IMAX to finding existing IMAX 70mm projectors around the world and updating them. This has so far enabled a slim 39 operating IMAX 70mm projectors worldwide, with 24 currently based in the United States. Outside of the USA, the only working IMAX 70mm projectors are in Canada, the UK, Australia, Belgium, and the Czech Republic.
As a result, most IMAX 70mm screenings of The Odyssey have sold out weeks in advance, with demand far outpacing supply. This is unlikely to change any time soon, as the number of IMAX 70mm locations is limited by the few IMAX 70mm projectors already in existence.
The Odyssey was released in theaters on July 17. The movie is Christopher Nolan's next film after his Best Picture win with Oppenheimer, and it stars Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, and John Leguizamo.
Can IMAX Solve Its Projector Problem After The Odyssey?
Now that The Odyssey has proven the capabilities of the IMAX 70mm medium, more filmmakers are bound to follow suit, meaning the need for more IMAX projects is likely to only go up in the coming years.
Sourcing and retrofitting IMAX 70mm projectors appears to be a painstaking process, and while the numbers have been increased to meet demand for The Odyssey, the result shows there's still not enough. But without the necessary blueprints to manufacture more projectors, how can IMAX solve this problem?
There's no immediate answer, but no film had ever been completely shot on 70mm IMAX film before The Odyssey, so anything is possible in this modern moviemaking age.
Nolan worked closely with IMAX engineers to help create an IMAX 70mm camera capable of capturing a film like The Odyssey, even inventing a new "blimp" shell that wrapped around the camera to help dampen the noise that had previously made it difficult to capture sequences on IMAX film. If this sort of innovation made it possible to capture IMAX 70mm, one can only hope that similar efforts will help create projectors capable of screening it.
