I didn’t get an IMAX ticket for The Odyssey — and now I am worried
A lack of an IMAX Odyssey ticket means this is the week I need to prepare for FOMO...
Quick Summary
The Odyssey is in cinemas 17 July, and is the first Hollywood film to be shot completely in 70mm IMAX.
New, lighter cameras had to be made to achieve this, while over 2 million feet of footage was shot.
Chris Nolan and IMAX are the cinematic equivalent of strawberries and cream. His love affair for the format began with optimising Batman Begins for the biggest of big screens. Since then he has ratcheted up the amount of IMAX shot footage in his movies.
But while only 28 minutes of The Dark Knight was shot for IMAX (back in 2008, this was in itself a fantastic feat), an incredible 100% of The Odyssey was shot on IMAX cameras.
It marks the first time a blockbuster movie has been shot completely in this way and this is why I, with my lack of an IMAX ticket, am seriously worried that I am going to miss out on the biggest movie event of the year.
It's a 'no' for Nolan
Like everyone on T3, I am a big fan of IMAX and my failure to get a ticket wasn’t without trying. My local IMAX, the BFI in Waterloo, London, is the perfect place to watch The Odyssey.
This is thanks to the screen being able to handle the full 70mm IMAX experience. Only 30 cinemas worldwide support this format – which is taller rather than wider – the format Nolan shot The Odyssey on. So getting a ticket to see the movie here is very much a Charlie/Chocolate Factory situation.
Unfortunately, there was no golden ticket for me: all the seats sold out while I was waiting in the virtual queue. I was shirked just like those social media influencers looking to get into a pre-screening of the movie.
This stung even harder as previous to my failed ticket attempt, I was lucky enough to catch the Trojan Horse sequence of the film at the BFI Waterloo, as it was playing before Project Hail Mary. The six or so minutes they showed was some of the best filmmaking I had seen on any screen.
Format focus
The next step was Leicester Square, where the IMAX is superb but given the screen is a more traditional rectangle shape, it can’t handle the full 70mm experience.
It’s still IMAX certified, though, but you are getting around a 40% reduction of Nolan’s vision. That 40% reduction may as well have been 100%, as I utterly failed to get tickets this way as well.
As I resign myself to the fact that my first watch of The Odyssey will be in traditional 35mm, the feeling of missing out on large chunks of the visuals gets even worse the more I read about how much work Nolan has done to make the movie completely in the IMAX format.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, after the success of Oppenheimer, the director had enough sway to get IMAX to create a brand-new camera for use on the movie, one that was 30% quieter and a good deal lighter.
The Odyssey formats explained
Using IMAX to the max
Given these cameras have been traditionally unwieldy, as the 70mm film stock consumes a huge amount of energy to run, is stored in large reels and weighs a massive amount, this is a massive step forward for the format. Nolan has admitted that he shot over two million feet of film for the movie, so he really made those new cameras work!
While these cameras have been exclusive to Nolan and his team, they will be made available to other filmmakers once the film is released, which will hopefully mean we get many more movies built for the biggest screen.
The importance of what Nolan has done to keep the format thriving can not be overstated. He has even dedicated the movie to David Keighley, the IMAX chief quality officer who worked with Nolan to make the format work for his movies.
And the other positive effect of this type of filmmaking is that movies like these demand to be seen on the big screen and are all part of the recent resurgence of people heading back to the cinema – according to Screen Daily, the box office for 2026 is up 14% Year on Year. So no matter what format you are watching The Odyssey in, that has to be a good thing, right? Right?
Who am I kidding? You’ll find me refreshing the BFI site day and night until they release more tickets and that will be my, er, odyssey for the foreseeable future.
The Odyssey is out 17 July in cinemas big and small in the UK, courtesy of Universal.
