Why The Odyssey Movie by Christopher Nolan Can Be Watched Properly in Only 41 Theatres Worldwide

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has become the first narrative feature film shot entirely on IMAX 15/70 film cameras, a technical milestone that took roughly three years of engineering work to make possible.

The push began with a direct request Nolan made to IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond at the Cannes Film Festival, asking the company to solve the camera's noise, reel change limitations and sound recording problems if he was to commit to shooting an entire film on the format. Gelfond agreed, and IMAX's engineering team set to work.

The IMAX 15/70 format runs 65mm film horizontally through the camera at more than five feet per second, producing images with roughly three times the resolution of digital cameras. That level of detail comes with real physical costs on set.

The camera and its protective housing, known as a blimp, weighed around 300 pounds (136 kilograms), and its mechanical noise measured between 80 and 100 decibels, loud enough to make dialogue recording nearly impossible without specialised sound dampening.

To solve that problem, IMAX built a new camera model named the Keighley, after longtime IMAX executives Patricia and David Keighley, alongside a refined blimp housing that muffled noise enough to allow usable dialogue recording close to actors' faces.

An IMAX 15/70 film camera and crew on set during production of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Photo: 60 Minutes

The blimp's size created a separate challenge on set. It was large enough to block actors' sightlines to one another during dialogue scenes, so the crew developed a simple workaround, positioning mirrors near the camera so performers could look at a reflection aligned with their scene partner's eyeline instead of the camera itself.

Even with the new equipment, each film magazine allowed only two and a half to three minutes of continuous shooting before requiring a reload, a mechanical constraint the production had to work around throughout filming, which took place across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, Western Sahara and Malta between February and August 2025.

The finished film runs 172 minutes, close to the practical ceiling for IMAX film projection, since the large horizontal platters used in IMAX film projectors cannot hold a print much longer without reliable splicing systems that have never been developed at scale.

Production used more than two million feet of film in total, assembled at FotoKem in Burbank, the last motion picture laboratory in the United States still capable of producing 70mm prints.

Despite that scale of production, only 41 theatres worldwide, most in the United States with a handful in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, are equipped to project the film in its full native 1.43:1 aspect ratio, the format that fills an IMAX screen from floor to ceiling.

The Odyssey in IMAX. Photo: Venom/X

New IMAX 70mm projectors have not been manufactured in roughly 50 years, and IMAX instead rebuilds existing units by hand, a constraint that has made building new auditoriums to the required specification prohibitively expensive for most cinema operators.

Everywhere else, audiences will see a cropped or reformatted version of the film rather than the full frame Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot.

The Odyssey was made on a reported $250 million budget and opened in cinemas on July 17, 2026, following its world premiere in London on July 6.

The Odyssey cover /Imax

The plot of The Odyssey movie adopted from Homer's epic poem: After the Trojan War, King Odysseus spends ten years battling angry gods and monsters to return home. Arriving in Ithaca, he uncovers a mob of greedy suitors overrunning his palace, whom he slaughters to reclaim his kingdom and family.