The Odyssey’s IMAX Film Run Hit a 41-Theater Limit

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey played true IMAX 70mm film in only 41 theaters worldwide. It is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, and those 15/70 rooms were the only places that could project the full 1.43:1 frame he photographed. The last of those prints came off after Sept. 30, 2026, following an 11-week hold IMAX stretched to meet demand it cannot house.

The bottleneck is not taste. IMAX has not manufactured new film projectors in about 50 years, so the first all-film IMAX feature depended on machines the company had to find, rebuild, and keep threading until the next title needed them.

IMAX Stopped Making the Machines 50 Years Ago

Nolan’s Oppenheimer already pushed the 15/70 network to 30 venues worldwide, 19 of them in the United States. For The Odyssey, IMAX spent more than a year hunting decommissioned and abandoned projectors, then rebuilt and moved parts until the count reached 41, a net gain of 11. It would have been 42. One unit was lost in the process.

Chief executive Richard Gelfond said the crush showed up as 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. shows selling out weeks ahead, and he did not pretend the company could stamp out more gates on a modern line.

We’re sold out in some theaters into the fifth week already, and the 2am shows, the 7am shows, so there’s certainly more demand. The problem is they haven’t made new IMAX film projectors in about 50 years. So we retrofit them, we rebuild them, and part of our strategy is to see how far we could take it. But certainly, demand-driven, I’d like to see more.

Richard Gelfond, CEO, IMAX

Pressed on why IMAX does not simply build new 15/70 units, Gelfond said the firm builds new projectors every day, but film projectors that run this stock are “not practical.” The company has to find the old ones and rebuild them, which is what it did for The Odyssey. He added that all of IMAX’s theaters cannot have film projectors, because there are not that many around.

That is the bill from the digital conversion. Laser IMAX is cheaper to install and cheaper to run, and it scales across a network IMAX puts at just over 1,800 screens. Forty-one film rooms are about 2 percent of that footprint. A 15/70 projector is a horizontal gate pulling a frame with 15 perforations, sending the print about 30 feet up to a ceiling platter and through the machine at 337 feet a minute. A finished Odyssey print weighs 600 pounds and stretches about 11 miles if you unwind it. Booths need the floor loading and the rewind tables that were specified when these machines were new, which is why scavenging a dead unit is faster than asking a board for a new factory.

Museum houses that never fully left film had a head start. Film still runs at the Tennessee Aquarium’s IMAX theatre in Chattanooga, and at science-center rooms in Fort Lauderdale, Indianapolis, and Regina. Austin’s Bullock Theatre dropped IMAX 70mm projection in 2016, so local viewers who wanted large format during this run were steered to laser IMAX and to ordinary 70mm at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, not to the 15/70 frame Nolan shot.

The Picture You Lose in Digital IMAX

Universal sold The Odyssey as an IMAX event on thousands of screens. Only the film rooms showed every part of the negative. The cameras captured a tall 1.43:1 image. In a typical IMAX with Laser auditorium the same movie plays at 1.90:1, which trims the top and bottom of every shot. Regular 5-perf 70mm, which runs vertically, holds 2.20:1. Standard 35mm and most digital houses go to 2.39:1, the widest crop on the studio’s own format guide.

HOW THE ODYSSEY WAS SHOWN

A handful of dual-laser GT houses can still throw 1.43:1 from a digital file, so the tall frame is not exclusive to celluloid. They are almost as scarce as the film projectors. The Odyssey was composed so the shorter ratios still read, which is how a $1.68 billion gross is possible when 41 rooms cannot carry the world. The intended picture, the one that fills an original IMAX screen from floor to ceiling, stayed inside that small circuit.

Early resale listings for those seats sat in the $300 to $400 range against face values around $25 to $28. The BFI IMAX in London sold 28,000 tickets in the first 24 hours on sale. Gelfond’s 2 a.m. shows were not a stunt. They were overflow from a format that does not add rooms when the line gets long.

The Keighley Camera Unlocked an All-Film Feature

The exhibition problem is old. The production problem is new. IMAX cameras were too loud for usable dialogue, which is why Nolan mixed 5-perf 65mm and 15-perf IMAX on Oppenheimer and skipped IMAX cameras on Inception. The Odyssey is the first narrative feature captured entirely on IMAX film, 172 minutes, every frame from those cameras, with Hoyte van Hoytema as director of photography and Matt Damon as Odysseus.

IMAX’s answer was a quieter 15-perf body named the Keighley, after the late chief quality officer David Keighley and his wife, Patricia. A blimp housing lets the camera sit close on speech. Nolan said you can shoot a foot from an actor’s face while they are whispering and still get usable sound, which opens “intimate moments of performance on the world’s most beautiful format.” Anne Hathaway still described the camera as loud. Tom Holland said the blimp changed the set.

The mechanics did not shrink. Each frame takes 15 perforations. At 24 frames a second that is 360 perforations a second, with the stock moving about 5.6 feet a second, the same speed class as the projector. An IMAX clip of the Keighley shows an LCD with 42 seconds of film remaining, a reminder that even the new body is still eating 70mm in short takes. IMAX said the production ran 2.1 million feet of film, a length the company compared to the distance from Toronto to New York.

That is the split inside the company. It can design a quieter camera and a modern readout for a 15-perf movement. It cannot, by Gelfond’s own account, stand up a line of matching projectors. The movie was shot as if the original IMAX theater still defined the business. Most of the network sold a cropped digital copy under the same logo.

Forty-One Film Rooms Took In $66 Million

Scarcity did not starve the movie. It concentrated the premium take. As of Sept. 3, during the last extension, IMAX 70mm screenings had earned $66 million across the 41 locations, about $1.6 million per screen. That is a slice of a much larger IMAX total. By Sept. 8, IMAX said The Odyssey had become its highest-grossing release of all time at $485 million, with IMAX screens accounting for 30 percent of the film’s worldwide box office, and with weeks still left in the initial run.

THE HAUL AROUND THOSE 41 ROOMS

• $66 million: IMAX 70mm film rooms only, as of the Sept. 3 extension, about $1.6 million a screen.
• $485 million: All IMAX formats as of Sept. 8, nearly double Avatar’s $271 million IMAX record.
• $1.68 billion: Universal’s worldwide total as of Sept. 12, passing Jurassic World’s $1.677 billion.
• 30 percent: Share of The Odyssey’s worldwide box office that IMAX said its screens held on Sept. 8.

Universal put domestic receipts at $601.2 million and international at $1.083 billion on that Sept. 12 tally. The film opened to $264.1 million worldwide on July 17. IMAX, posting IMAX’s $728 million summer record the same week as the last 70mm extension, said the network took 5.8 percent of the summer’s global box office on just over 1,800 screens, 73 percent above its 2023 summer high. Gelfond called it a broader awakening around IMAX. The film rooms were the part of that story that could not be copied.

Two percent of the network printing a $66 million 70mm line is the argument for keeping prints up. It is also the argument that laser IMAX, not new film gates, will keep getting the capital. The AMC-style buildout of recent years has been laser. The Odyssey’s 41 rooms were a restoration project, not a prototype for 400 more.

Where the 41 IMAX 70mm Theaters Are

IMAX posted its participating IMAX 70mm film theatres with ticket links, and later lists that matched that roll call held at 41. Twenty-five were in the United States, nine in Canada, three in the United Kingdom, and one each in Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and France. California alone had eight of the American rooms, including TCL Chinese Theatres in Hollywood, AMC Metreon in San Francisco, and AMC Lincoln Square in New York as the East Coast flagship. Texas had Cinemark Dallas and AMC Rivercenter 11 in San Antonio, the latter of which had technical trouble on opening weekend and still ran sold-out shows after that.

THE 41 ROOMS BY COUNTRY

• United States: 25 theaters, with eight in California and two each in Colorado, New York, Tennessee, and Texas.
• Canada: 9, including Cineplex and Scotiabank houses in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax, Richmond, and Montréal, plus Regina’s science centre.
• United Kingdom: 3, the BFI IMAX, the Science Museum IMAX screen in London, and Vue Manchester Printworks.
• Rest of world: IMAX Melbourne, Kinepolis Brussels, Cinema City Prague, and Pathé Odysseum in Montpellier.

London’s third large film screen is the Science Museum IMAX screen in London, a reminder that several of the surviving gates still sit in museums rather than multiplexes. IMAX Melbourne is the only 15/70 house in the southern hemisphere. A screening there stopped around the 20-minute mark when the projector hiccuped, and the room sat in the dark while staff sent people out to wait. That is 50-year-old hardware running 337 feet of film a minute, not a laser deck you reboot.

By the last days of the run, the booth itself had become part of the trip. People talked their way in to photograph the GT projector and a print of The Odyssey, treating the machine as the artifact the 41-room map had promised. The laser network never inspired that kind of visit, because there is nothing rare about a digital head that IMAX can ship by the hundred.

Sept. 30 Ended the 11-Week Film Run

Tickets for some 70mm shows went on sale a year before opening. IMAX then kept adding dates because the rooms stayed full. A mid-run hold carried the film toward mid-September. On Sept. 3 the company posted a further update: more IMAX 70mm showtimes through Sept. 30, at 39 of the 41 auditoriums, stretching the film run to 11 weeks.

THE 70MM CLOCK

1. July 17, 2026: The Odyssey opens, with true 15/70 prints in 41 theaters worldwide and 25 in the United States.
2. Sept. 3, 2026: IMAX adds showtimes through Sept. 30 at 39 film auditoriums and puts 70mm receipts at $66 million.
3. Sept. 8, 2026: IMAX reports $485 million from all IMAX screens and a 30 percent share of the film’s worldwide box office.
4. Sept. 12, 2026: Universal puts the worldwide total at $1.68 billion, ahead of Jurassic World.
5. Sept. 30, 2026: The IMAX 70mm film run ends after 11 weeks.

Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre was down to its last 70mm nights before that date, and said so in public.

Just TWO NIGHT left to experience #TheOdyssey in #IMAX 70mm Film.

Click for showtimes and to reserve your seats – https://t.co/6qtCECEjZv pic.twitter.com/y24braWT9M

— TCL Chinese Theatres (@ChineseTheatres) September 29, 2026

Tom Cruise’s Digger, from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, is next in line for those film rooms. The Odyssey can still play in laser IMAX and in ordinary 70mm and digital houses. The 15/70 version cannot, unless a theater threads a print again on the same rebuilt gates. Gelfond said he would like to see more of those gates. The company spent a year making 11 extras and lost one along the way, and the first feature shot entirely on IMAX film still closed out 70mm on a 41-room map IMAX does not know how to enlarge.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Is IMAX 70mm Different From Regular 70mm Film?

Regular 70mm is 5-perf stock that runs vertically and, on The Odyssey, played at 2.20:1. IMAX 70mm is 15-perf stock that runs horizontally at 1.43:1, and the soundtrack is not printed on the film; IMAX audio is synced from a separate hard drive so the entire frame is picture. That is why a 15/70 print needs a different projector, a ceiling platter, and a booth built for a 600-pound roll, and why a theater that can run 70mm Todd-AO-style still cannot throw the IMAX frame.

How Much Film Did Nolan Shoot for The Odyssey?

IMAX said the production ran 2.1 million feet of film, a length the company compared to the distance from Toronto to New York. The Keighley’s own transport moves about 5.6 feet of 15-perf stock every second at 24 frames, which is why magazines empty in under a minute and why an all-IMAX-film feature is a supply problem for Kodak as much as a camera problem.

Can IMAX Laser Show the Same 1.43:1 Image?

A small group of dual-laser GT theaters can present The Odyssey at 1.43:1 from a digital file, which preserves the tall composition without celluloid. Most IMAX with Laser sites are 1.90:1, so they crop the top and bottom of every shot even though the movie was photographed for the taller gate. If a listing says IMAX and not IMAX 70mm film, assume the crop unless the venue is a known GT 1.43 house.

When Did The Odyssey’s IMAX 70mm Run End?

The 15/70 engagement ended on Sept. 30, 2026, after 11 weeks. That date was the third extension of the film run, and it covered additional showtimes at 39 of the 41 auditoriums rather than a 42nd projector. Advance tickets for some of those rooms had gone on sale a year before the July 17 opening, which is why the last week was a leftover-seat hunt rather than a second chance for cities that never had a gate.