The hottest tickets in town (any town) are showings of the 70mm edition of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Such showings sold out instantly, and getting into one now would require you to pay absurd resell prices. IMAX has tried to accommodate the demand by adding showings at seemingly unusual times (who wants to go see a three hour movie at 2 a.m?), but the supply hasn’t come close to meeting the demand. And while The Odyssey is available in many theaters in multiple formats, it was clearly filmed with 70mm IMAX screenings as the “ideal” experience, making it all the more frustrating that it’s going to be nearly impossible to see the movie that way.
The big problem is that there are only about 40 IMAX centers in the world equipped with the projectors required to show the movie in that way. So why doesn’t IMAX install those projectors in more of its theaters? According to IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond, it’s because they simply don’t make them anymore.
“The problem is they haven’t made new IMAX film projectors in about 50 years,” Gelfond said in an interview with Variety. “So we retrofit them, rebuild them, and part of our strategy is to see how far we can take it. But certainly, demand-driven, I’d like to see more.”
It is an… odd explanation to what is seemingly a fairly notable issue for a company trying to sell as many tickets as possible. Yet, Gelfond argues that the reason why so few theaters can support 70mm screenings is because they just don’t build the required projectors anymore. When pressed to elaborate on why the company simply doesn’t manufacture more of the equipment, Gelfond offered this equally strange follow-up reply.
“We build new projectors every day, but film projectors using this film, it’s not practical. So we’ve got to find them, and we’ve got to rebuild them, which is what we did for The Odyssey,” Gelfond explains. “But can all 2,000 of our theaters have the film projectors? No, there’s just not that many around. But I think we could continue to grow it.”
There do really seem to be some missing pieces to that explanation. It seems that IMAX either doesn’t know how to build those projectors anymore or has determined that the cost to do so en masse is simply not worth the revenue they would generate from the number of movies that would eventually support that format. The latter seems more likely and is, perhaps, understandable if you’re trying to outfit every IMAX screen with such projectors. But if you’re just trying to add a little more support for the biggest IMAX movie of the year (if not ever), then one wonders if it wouldn’t be worth it to crank out a few more projectors.
Regardless, you can still technically try to snag some Odyssey 70mm tickets over the next few weeks. Just don’t be surprised if you have to “settle” for another format.
