Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY is selling out IMAX 70mm screenings weeks in advance, and the biggest reason IMAX cannot simply add more shows is almost embarrassingly analog: the blueprints for the projectors do not exist anymore.
“There’s certainly more demand. The problem is they haven’t made new IMAX film projectors in about 50 years,” IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond told Variety at the movie’s premiere. “So we retrofit them, rebuild them and part of our strategy is to see how far we can take it.”
Only 39 IMAX 70mm projectors are operating worldwide right now, with 24 in the United States, according to reporting by The Direct. Outside the US, audiences can find them only in Canada, the UK, Australia, Belgium and the Czech Republic.
Sources at IMAX told Variety the original engineering drawings for the machines “no longer exist,” and the specialists who could rebuild them from scratch have largely aged out of the industry. Gelfond said building new film projectors from the ground up is “not practical,” so IMAX has to hunt down the old ones and retrofit them one by one.
“We build new projectors every day, but film projectors using this film, it’s not practical,” Gelfond said. “So we’ve got to find them, we’ve got to retrofit them and rebuild them, which is what we did for THE ODYSSEY.”
That squeeze has produced some of the wildest theatrical demand in years. Tickets went on sale a full year before release. New York’s Lincoln Square IMAX sold out 3 a.m. screenings. IMAX posted $52 million globally on opening weekend, its biggest debut ever, accounting for roughly 20% of THE ODYSSEY’s worldwide take.
“The demand for IMAX 70mm Film has exceeded even our expectations,” an IMAX spokesperson told Fortune. “We’ve never seen demand for IMAX Film on this scale.”
The movie stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, alongside Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal and John Leguizamo in Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s ancient epic. It is the first narrative feature ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras, using a custom “blimp” sound-dampening casing Nolan and IMAX engineers built so the notoriously loud cameras — reportedly $500,000 apiece — could handle dialogue as well as action.
Homer’s poem has been retold for nearly three thousand years for a reason. It is the story of a soldier’s long fight to get home to his wife and son, of temptation resisted, hospitality honored and endurance rewarded. Penelope’s 20-year fidelity to her missing husband is one of the oldest arguments for marital faithfulness in world literature, and the story’s warnings about the sirens, the lotus-eaters, and the temptations of easy comfort read a lot like sermons the church has been preaching ever since.
Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore-owned Rentrak, called the opening “one of the most monumental weekends in moviegoing history” — not just for the numbers but for what packed rooms and sold-out concession stands say about the audience. “The audience is telling the industry something,” Dergarabedian said. “The most powerful people in Hollywood are the moviegoers and they either vote by being there or not being there.”
For families debating whether to make the trek to the nearest 70mm theater, the practical news is that most 70mm dates are already gone. Availability at digital IMAX, Dolby and standard screens remains solid, and Nolan shot the movie to be legible in every format. But the true 70mm experience will stay rare until IMAX can rebuild more of the projectors that Hollywood almost let disappear.
THE ODYSSEY is now playing.
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