Forklifts? 10 mile reels? The wild reason seeing The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm is so damn hard

Watching The Odyssey the way Christopher Nolan intended has turned into an odyssey in and of itself. As it turns out, there’s a reason why watching the film in IMAX 70mm has become such a challenge. 

The Odyssey is the first commercial feature film to be shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras. It’s something Nolan had always wanted to do, so it’s easy to see why he chose Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic to finally make it a reality. 

The scale and visual detail is on another level, but it also means screenings are limited. Only 41 cinemas worldwide are capable of projecting the film in its full capacity. 

Although tickets have been selling out months in advance, IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond explained that new projectors haven’t been made in around half a century, so they have to retrofit or rebuild them. 

It’s been a huge talking point amid the release of The Odyssey, and while it’s led many to assume the shortage is simply down to demand, the reality is more complex. 

The decades-old problem facing IMAX 70mm

As revealed by Popular Science writer Andrew Paul, the technology itself is the problem. Most IMAX cinemas today use digital or laser projectors that are comparatively easy to build and repair. 

But IMAX 70mm still relies on projector technology dating back to the late 1960s. As such, almost nobody still manufactures them or has the specialist knowledge needed to maintain them.

“Most IMAX use dual 2K digital projectors on a 1.90:1 aspect ratio screen – technology that is comparatively easy to build and repair,” wrote Paul. 

“True 70mm IMAX projectors are a different story. These machines don’t resemble the classic image of traditional 35mm designs in any way.

 “At over 5.5 feet tall and nearly 6.5 feet long, an IMAX projector weighs as much as two tons and uses a xenon lamp requiring its own pump and water cool.”

There’s also the film itself. Instead of arriving as a single reel, IMAX 70mm prints are shipped to cinemas in multiple sections before being painstakingly hand-spliced together into one enormous platter.

The four-to-six foot-wide platters have to be handled with a special forklift. “A 2.5 hour film reel easily spans nearly 10 miles long, weighs around 550 pounds, and costs about $36,000 to print,” Paul added. 

Each image on IMAX 70mm film is around 10 times larger than a standard 35mm movie frame, and the film runs horizontally through the projector using 15 perforations for every image.

It’s no wonder Nolan’s IMAX advisor told him he couldn’t go over the three-hour mark (The Odyssey clocks in at two hours and 52 minutes, so it’s still a huge feat). 

Simply put, this isn’t a format that can be recreated or rejigged for a modern production line.

Plus, many IMAX 70mm projectionists have spent years learning to operate the machines. As more cinemas switched to digital projection, much of that expertise disappeared, leaving very few people capable of handling the remaining systems.

The success of The Odyssey has shown there’s still huge demand for the premium format, and IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond has said the company will continue retrofitting and maintaining projectors wherever it makes sense. 

But with relatively few films released in IMAX 70mm each year, expanding the network remains a slow and expensive process. Keeping it alive very much depends on whether future filmmakers can drum up the same level of demand as Nolan. 

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Featured image credit: Universal Pictures