What the “Odyssey” IMAX Frenzy Means for the Future of Film

Few contemporary filmmakers have been as vocal about saving the movies as Christopher Nolan. In the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post about the cultural necessity of the cinema, how it served as “the most affordable and democratic of our community gathering places.” In his view, the movie theatre was as essential to public life as the library or the park, an accessible and protected space where people could get together, eat popcorn, and dream for a few hours. “In uncertain times, there is no more comforting thought than that we’re all in this together, something the moviegoing experience has been reinforcing for generations,” he wrote, arguing that cinema will never “cease to be of value.” He also had a movie coming out, the spy thriller “Tenet,” and COVID-19 lockdowns were shuttering theatres across the country, some permanently. The media conglomerates that owned both the Hollywood studios and the streaming platforms didn’t seem to mind the potential death of the theatre—directly releasing films to viewers via an at-home subscription service provided more distribution control and increased profits. But Nolan saw the shift to streaming as an existential threat to the movies, one that undermined both the public good and the vision of the filmmaker. For more technically ambitious films—of which Nolan almost exclusively makes—the theatre was basically a formal requirement. “Tenet” was shot in large-format film, including IMAX 70-mm., and was, according to Nolan, meant to be a “big-screen experience.” When it finally opened in the U.S., in the fall of 2020, it was one of the first pandemic-era blockbusters to test the box office. And even though it performed relatively well given the circumstances, the future of theatrically released pictures still looked bleak.

Anxieties about the future of movie theatres, of course, predated the pandemic. At the height of Marvel’s box-office supremacy, in the late twenty-tens, audiences turned out en masse to see their favorite comic-book characters on the big screen, but not for much else. As Michael Schulman wrote in The New Yorker, in 2023, “In an I.P.-driven ecosystem, individual stars no longer attract audiences to theatres the way they used to, with a handful of exceptions (Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts). You go to a Marvel movie to see Captain America, not Chris Evans.” The Marvel Cinematic Universe prompted other studios to mint their own franchises and “universes,” pipelines of spinoffs, sequels, and sprawling ensembles. The middle class of movies—rom-coms, quiet domestic dramas, teen sex comedies—saw its role in the theatrical marketplace diminish before migrating mostly into the streaming economy. Some major filmmakers took umbrage with the M.C.U.’s dominance, including Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, the latter of whom called the franchise “despicable.” “Tenet,” however, along with the later success of “Top Gun: Maverick,” provided a blueprint for box-office success in a post-Marvel world: a big-name director and even bigger-name actors telling a story at an enormous physical scale. The summer of Barbenheimer, in 2023, further proved that non-superhero-centered movies helmed by prominent directors and star-studded casts could still rise to the status of cultural events. The key, it seemed, was to promise audiences an immersive, irreplaceable theatrical experience, one that, if missed in real time, could not be re-created at home.

Nolan’s latest film, “The Odyssey,” is, if nothing else, an event. Stacked with A-list stars and towering set pieces, it aims to tell one of the Western world’s foundational myths in a modern register, sparing no expense in rendering Homer’s epic on as extravagant a scale as possible. For Nolan, this meant shooting the film entirely on IMAX 70-mm. cameras, making it the first-ever feature film to do so. To experience the film in its intended analog format, viewers need to sojourn to one of the twenty-five theatres in the country equipped to project IMAX 70-mm. Presale tickets for these screenings went live last summer, before “The Odyssey” had even finished filming; nearly every ticket sold within an hour of its listing. A frenzied resale market followed, with secondary tickets going for as much as hundreds of dollars on sites like eBay, Reddit, and Discord. Scams abounded: anonymous online users have reportedly solicited upfront payments from prospective buyers before disappearing and deleting their accounts. For viewers determined to see Nolan’s film on the biggest screen imaginable, the risk may be worth it. The director has established himself as this century’s preëminent Hollywood filmmaker, the rare working artist whose catalogue is as commercially indomitable as it is critically lauded. Not seeing “The Odyssey” in IMAX 70-mm., or waiting to watch it at home, or on a plane, meant you weren’t really seeing “The Odyssey,” a point Nolan repeated throughout the film’s marketing campaign. “By shooting on IMAX 70 mm film, you’re really letting the screen disappear,” Nolan told the Post, last week. “It really is just a great way of giving people an experience that they can’t possibly get in the home.”

Since Hollywood began experimenting with IMAX technology, in the early two-thousands, the brand has become synonymous with a sort of cinematic exceptionalism, a format reserved for the year’s biggest and glitziest blockbusters. Once known predominantly for projecting educational installations at museums and aquariums, IMAX spent decades trying to break into the mainstream, though its limited network of theatres and analog-only format proved prohibitive for major studios. In the mid-two-thousands, as Hollywood transitioned to digital filmmaking, IMAX began building and repurposing theatres across the country, outfitting them with digital-projection systems and slightly smaller, but still huge, screens. These new IMAX multiplexes may have paled in comparison with the company’s original goal of totalizing immersion, but the strategy worked: soon, the year’s most profitable films were appearing on IMAX screens. Nolan’s 2008 film “The Dark Knight” was the first major fiction feature to shoot scenes with IMAX cameras, and it is widely credited with legitimatizing the format as a destination for mainstream blockbusters. With each new release, Nolan grew more obsessed with the possibilities of IMAX, progressively shooting larger portions of his movies—with the notable exception of “Inception”—with their specialized film cameras. “The Odyssey” marks his headlong descent into IMAX maximalism, architecting his films around the scale and the scope that the format is uniquely able to deliver.