Ever since Oppenheimer blew our minds, we’ve been itching for another new Christopher Nolan movie to follow his Oscar-winning biopic epic, and we’re a year and a couple months away from that day. Back in December, it was announced Nolan is adapting Homer’s The Odyssey with Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o and many other names. Now been revealed that the filmmaker also is doing an IMAX first with The Odyssey.
The movie based on the epic poem from Ancient Greek literature will officially be the first movie to be completely shot on IMAX cameras. Here’s what IMAX boss Rich Gelfond ssaid during Cannes Film Festival about the undertaking (via Deadline):
A year before Chris started filming The Odyssey, he called me and said he wanted to make a whole film shot with IMAX cameras. That couldn’t be done for a lot of reasons. There were lots of issues. . . . [Nolan said] ‘I’m going to give you a challenge. If you can figure out how to solve these problems, I’m going to make Odyssey 100% film with film with IMAX cameras’, and we’ve solved his problems. So, this will be the first film ever, at least filmed 100% with IMAX cameras.
If you’re not familiar with why movies are not shot entirely on IMAX, there’s a laundry list as to why. To give you a rundown, IMAX cameras are incredibly expensive, heavy, loud and their film loads can only hold so much footage at once. The sound of an IMAX camera has been likened to a lawnmower because there’s a vacuum that runs inside the camera to keep its extra large film strips completely flat. Imagine filming a whole movie with a lawnmower sound as the soundtrack? According to Gelfond, IMAX found a way past some of the inherent problems with filming.
While the use of IMAX cameras are usually brought in to shoot purely visual sequences, for example with the revolving corridor fight from Inception. Prior to The Odyssey, Oppenheimer is the closest film to it to have that much of it be shot on IMAX. The 70mm IMAX version of the movie, which played in 30 IMAX theaters, was actually 600 pounds and 11 miles long (via CBS News) due to its nearly three-hour runtime.
Nolan’s work on Oppenheimer paid off considering the movie made $100 million in IMAX (and $975.8 million worldwide overall on all formats). The IMAX version was so popular that a second 70MM IMAX run occurred three months after the original and very successful summer release in 2023. The movie also won Best Picture alongside six other Academy Awards, including Best Cinematography. He’s pushing the limit further with The Odyssey. As Gelfond also said:
Chris forced us to rethink how we operated our film side of our business in different ways, so we have a program now to train new projectionists, and we’re putting more parts around the world, and we’re working harder at developing spare parts, and we’re looking at ancillary things like film recorders and film scanners. You know, it’s not just a camera thing. It kind of was a challenge to look at our business in a different way. And I’m glad he gave us that challenge.
It does make you wonder just how IMAX achieved this, and if the cast of The Odyssey show up everyday on set with earplugs on. We can’t wait to learn more about the making and who big names like Tom Holland are playing and see more images of the entirely IMAX film. It’s coming to theaters on July 17, 2026.