Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened in theaters nationwide Friday, and only 41 screens on the planet can show it exactly the way he shot it. At the time of publication, IMAX’s official participating-theater page lists 41 locations worldwide offering the movie in IMAX 70mm film. The sprawling adaptation of Homer’s epic is the first-ever movie shot entirely on Imax film cameras, and critics have responded with a 96 percent Certified Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and an 88 percent score on Metacritic, according to Gold Derby’s tracking of the review embargo.
Social media split almost instantly. One widely shared post held up a side-by-side comparison, the same frame from The Odyssey shown at full IMAX height next to a mock-up of how it looks cropped down for a standard cinema screen. Another viewer joked online that the biggest question wasn’t Odysseus surviving the Cyclops, it was whether you’d even notice Agamemnon’s helmet towering over him unless you caught it on the big format. A third simply wrote that losing so many 70mm screens felt unfair, and wished they could see the real version.
The Frame Fans Are Fighting Over
The confusion is understandable, because IMAX now sells at least four different versions of the same movie, and they are not interchangeable. IMAX 70mm film uses a 15-perforation frame that runs horizontally through the projector, and at compatible theaters The Odyssey is presented in IMAX’s expanded 1.43:1 aspect ratio, allowing the image to fill more of the screen. Everything else is a crop of that original image.
| Format | Aspect Ratio | How It Works | Where To Find It |
|---|---|---|---|
| IMAX 70mm film | 1.43:1 | Physical 15-perf film print run horizontally through a vintage projector | 41 theaters worldwide |
| Digital IMAX | 1.90:1 (1.43:1 on dual-laser screens) | Digital projection, no physical print required | The widest rollout of any premium format |
| Standard 70mm (5-perf) | 2.20:1 | True film print, but it runs vertically and crops the top and bottom of the frame | A handful of specialty film houses |
| 35mm film | 2.39:1 | Classic analog widescreen presentation | Select revival and arthouse screens |
The practical effect, according to reporting from The Guardian cited by GamesRadar, is that the vast majority of ticket holders will watch a cropped, digitally projected version that strips away up to 40 percent of the image Nolan composed. You can still book a seat at the format Nolan actually intended through IMAX’s own 70mm showtime finder, if one exists near you.
Why Are There Only 41 IMAX 70mm Screens?
IMAX has 41 theaters worldwide equipped for true 70mm projection, and that number stayed low because nobody has manufactured a new IMAX film projector in roughly 50 years. Engineers spent over a year hunting down retired units, rebuilding them by hand, and training dozens of new projectionists just to reach that total.
We’re sold out in some theaters into the fifth week already. 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.
Richard Gelfond, IMAX’s chief executive, told Variety at the film’s premiere. The effort ultimately resulted in 41 Imax 70mm locations worldwide for The Odyssey, up from 30 for Oppenheimer, a net increase of 11 after one projector was lost during the process. The strenuous process also required training 60 new projectionists from scratch.
Even if IMAX could manufacture more units tomorrow, the bottleneck would not disappear. Imax says exhibitors aren’t building enough auditoriums capable of housing its towering 1.43:1 screens because of the high construction costs. A single commercial IMAX projector runs anywhere from $300,000 to more than $1.2 million depending on the technology, according to Gelfond’s comments to Variety reported by TechRadar.
Fans Are Rearranging Their Lives for Ithaca
The scarcity has produced some genuinely strange behavior. Universal made the unprecedented move of putting Imax tickets to The Odyssey on sale a year in advance, and most screenings sold out within hours; a second tranche went on sale in June and fans dealt with hours-long waits and crashed sites. Resale sites have listed tickets for as much as $500 each, according to the Associated Press, as cited by Yahoo.
- Simon James, a New York attorney, bought 18 tickets to Imax 70mm screenings of The Odyssey at AMC Lincoln Square over the film’s first three weeks of release.
- Amber Connaghan, a tech editor based in the California desert, bought her ticket over a year ago and has been gearing up for the three-hour drive to the closest theater playing the film in Imax 70mm.
- Tim McHugh, a healthcare consultant, is flying from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles in order to see The Odyssey in Imax 70mm at Universal City Walk.
- Some moviegoers are flying to Melbourne, Australia, home to the southern hemisphere’s only IMAX 70mm theater, to watch the film.
The theater’s general manager, Jeremy Fee, said the pull is real. “We have people who built their holidays around their Odyssey screening, which is pretty incredible,” he told Yahoo.
Two Decades From The Dark Knight to This
Nolan has said the ambition to shoot a full feature on IMAX cameras goes back to when he was a teenager, and the technical path to actually doing it ran through nearly every film he’s made since. “It’s been a very long journey, starting with The Dark Knight,” Nolan told The Independent. “That was the first film where we were able to go to IMAX and say, ‘Lend us your cameras. Let’s try this on things like the introduction of the Joker, the truck flip.’ But we couldn’t do the dialogue scenes because the cameras are very, very loud.”
He added that once The Odyssey was greenlit, he went back to IMAX and pushed to finally shoot an entire film that way. The obstacle was always noise and bulk. IMAX 1570 cameras are enormous, weighing around 180kg, they’re notoriously loud, and each reel of film lasts only about three minutes before needing to be replaced. After Oppenheimer, IMAX and Nolan developed a soundproof housing known as the blimp that finally made it quiet enough to record dialogue while shooting on the cameras.
The shoot itself was a logistical undertaking to match. Nolan told Empire that production shot over 2 million feet of film during 91 days of production across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, Western Sahara and Malta, as well as at the Universal Studios lot in Los Angeles. That last location drew its own controversy; the film’s production choices around occupied Western Sahara became a flashpoint months before release, layered on top of a marketing rollout built on hidden Easter eggs teased ahead of launch.
Where Critics and Classicists Split
The format debate is only one layer of noise around this release. Casting choices sparked their own fight well before anyone saw a frame, and it hasn’t fully cooled.
- Greek-British journalist Chris Cotonou wrote in The Guardian that Greeks had been left out by Hollywood, again and with no explanation, from their own foundational mythologies and epics.
- Classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, whose own translation of Homer published last year, called the outrage over the casting of Helen, played by Lupita Nyong’o’s casting announcement, “particularly silly” given Helen’s tiny role in the Odyssey, though he added the choice was consonant with the myth’s real concern, which is how to think about beauty.
- Author Tom Shone told the BBC that the director is “a Rorschach director” whose films allow both the left and the right to find endorsement.
Some of the anger has bled into the format debate itself. “Filming in a format that only ~40 cinemas across the world can fully display is anti-art,” one fan wrote on X, with a second agreeing, “Actually it’s anti art that only 40 theaters can show it.”
Nolan has mostly declined to engage. Asked about the backlash, he called it something that comes with the territory of making a big swing, and added that pre-release arguments are, in his experience, beside the point, since nobody arguing has actually seen the finished film yet, a point he’s made before.
The Ripple Reaches Spider-Man’s Release Window
The exclusivity built into this release has knock-on effects beyond ticket prices. Given his collaboration with Imax, the company is dedicating all of its screens to The Odyssey for an exclusive three-week run. That squeezes the format’s real estate right as Sony gears up for its own tentpole; Zendaya and Tom Holland co-star in Odyssey without sharing scenes, then headline Sony and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day less than a month later, a rare case of two married stars anchoring back-to-back releases.
The box office math backs up the confidence behind that exclusivity. The film was projected to open to $90 million to $100 million from 3,900 North American theaters, a range that would rank as Nolan’s biggest debut since 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, which opened to $160 million. By the week of release, tracking had tightened further. Industry estimates settled into an $85 million to $105 million range domestically, with another $110 million or so expected internationally for a global bow well past $200 million, topping Nolan’s $82.4 million Oppenheimer debut. Boxoffice Pro’s own long-range panel had earlier put the domestic number as high as $100 million to $120 million on opening weekend, driven by premium-format demand.
Whether IMAX ever meaningfully expands its 70mm footprint depends on what happens after this weekend. Gelfond has said growth is the goal, but admitted the company can’t retrofit its way to universal access. Imax and AMC struck a deal last year to add 12 new Imax locations across the U.S. and upgrade 68 existing locations to Imax With Laser, which suggests where the near-term growth will actually land, and it isn’t 70mm film. Readers can track how the opening weekend actually lands against these forecasts through the film’s box office and financial tracking page. Real numbers post Sunday, but the 41-screen bottleneck will still be there long after this weekend’s grosses roll in.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes IMAX 70mm different from digital IMAX?
IMAX 70mm runs an actual physical film print through a vintage projector at the full 1.43:1 frame Nolan shot, while most digital IMAX screens show a cropped 1.90:1 image. The 70mm film offers a bright, clear image up to three times the resolution of standard digital projection formats, which is why fans chase it specifically rather than settling for any IMAX-branded screen.
Why did Christopher Nolan shoot the whole film on IMAX cameras?
Nolan has argued the format is simply the best tool available for scale and clarity. Speaking to the Associated Press before Oppenheimer’s release, he said IMAX 70mm is the ideal theater experience because the sharpness, the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled. The Odyssey marks the first time he’s committed an entire feature to that format rather than a handful of sequences.
How much does an IMAX 70mm projector actually cost?
Commercial IMAX projectors run anywhere from $300,000 to over $1.2 million, depending on whether the unit is digital, laser, or traditional 70mm film. That price tag, combined with the scarcity of usable parts, is a big reason exhibitors have been slow to add new film-capable auditoriums.
Will more IMAX 70mm theaters open after The Odyssey?
Nothing has been confirmed for new film screens specifically. IMAX and AMC already struck a deal to add 12 new IMAX locations across the U.S. and upgrade 68 existing locations to IMAX With Laser, but that expansion is digital, not the rare 70mm film format fans are chasing right now.
How long is The Odyssey, and is it Nolan’s longest film?
The Odyssey has an official runtime of 172 minutes, or 2 hours and 52 minutes, slightly shorter than Nolan’s three-hour Oppenheimer but still his second-longest movie. The runtime wasn’t arbitrary either; older IMAX film platters cap out at around three hours before physically running out of room.
