Dublin has IMAX at Cineworld on Parnell Street. Dublin also has 70mm film projection at the Irish Film Institute which screened “The Odyssey” (Christopher Nolan, 2026) exclusively on 70mm and reported huge opening weekend attendance, part of a wider Irish opening weekend that made almost €1 million at the box office. What Dublin does not have is both together. The specific format Nolan used to shoot the film — 15-perforation IMAX film running through a small number of surviving giant screen projectors — exists nowhere in Ireland. The nearest theatres equipped for it are across the water, at the BFI IMAX and the Science Museum in London, and outlets have reported a steady flow of fans flying there specifically to see the film in the “Nolan intended” format.
To understand why that gap exists at all, it helps to look at what Nolan has spent nearly two decades building. His attachment to the format long predates this film. He first convinced Warner Bros. to shoot a sequence of “The Dark Knight” on IMAX cameras in 2008, when the format was still largely confined to museum, and nature documentary screens. He has expanded its role in every film since. While Nolan has previously developed custom black and white 65mm film stock that had not previously existed, for “The Odyssey”, IMAX went further still, building Nolan an entirely new camera at his request, engineered specifically to let him shoot an entire narrative feature on IMAX film.
Nolan describes the appeal in sensory terms. Watching a properly projected 70mm image means “letting the screen disappear”, filling enough of the audience’s peripheral vision to replicate three-dimensional depth without the discomfort of 3D glasses. He has called IMAX “the gold standard, what any other technology has to match up to, but none have”. Well before the format’s current resurgence, in a 2012 interview, he framed his advocacy in more urgent terms, warning that the choice to shoot on film at all was in danger of disappearing entirely; a preservation project as much as an aesthetic preference.
That preference is also one that resists accessibility. Nolan has drawn on the idea of the “resistance of the medium”, borrowed from the artist Tacita Dean; that a material’s physical limitations are themselves part of what makes working in it creatively meaningful. While digital innovations can typically be scaled — a new streaming codec or a higher frame rate can be pushed to any screen with the right software update — a physical film print, shot on a camera custom-built for one production and projected through hardware nobody has manufactured in fifty years, cannot. The qualities Nolan is chasing are defined by their inability to travel, which means every choice that deepens his commitment to the format also narrows who can be in the room for it.
That mechanical consequence is what has kept the format’s footprint so small industry wide. No new IMAX 70mm film projectors have been manufactured in roughly 50 years; the original blueprints were never properly maintained, some components “simply no longer exist”, and few engineers today fully understand the systems or have the enormous amounts of money required to build one. What is left is 41 theatres worldwide: 25 in the United States, and beyond North America, just six other countries — the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and France, plus nine locations across Canada. There is no 70mm access anywhere in Africa, South America, the Middle East, or South or Southeast Asia. India, a market of more than a billion people that already has IMAX theatres in several cities, has none.
Within the handful of countries that do have access, geography and money do further sorting. In the United States, fans in Kansas City or New Orleans face a roughly 500-mile drive to reach the nearest 70mm screen. Standard tickets run as high as $35, and resale listings have gone for as much as $1,500 to $2,000. Getting to “the way Nolan intended” requires some combination of proximity, disposable income, and flexible time, in whatever proportion the local map demands.
That combination is exactly what critics point to when they call the rollout elitist. The limited format has drawn criticism on social media, with one widely shared reaction on X calling a release format only a few dozen theatres can properly show “anti-art”. On Reddit, threads in r/TheOdysseyMovie argue that locking a film’s premier visual experience behind a specialized, expensive format purposefully alienates a large portion of moviegoers. For them, the loss is not counted in the missing margins of the 1.43:1 aspect ratio, but more in the experience of being told, repeatedly and by name, that the version you can actually get to is not “the real one”.
On the other side of the spectrum, a different argument unfolds. Adam Hlavac, a social media creator of the account Heroes Forged and a former AMC projectionist, disputes that access is not a genuine problem. He states that he understands people’s accessibility complaints, but pushes back on the idea that the standard version is a lesser one: Nolan, he says, deliberately composed every shot with essential detail kept toward the center of frame, specifically so nothing important would be lost once the image is cropped down for wide theatrical release. The 70mm frame indeed shows more image at the top and bottom of the screen than any other version, and some viewers count that cropping as a real loss in its own right. But no scenes, and no story information, disappear outside the 41 theatres.
Whether this adds up to elitism depends on Nolan’s intent. He is not choosing to keep the format out of any particular country or income bracket. By his own account, he is chasing a specific creative philosophy that happens to be structurally unscalable and IMAX is straining against a genuine manufacturing collapse rather than manufacturing scarcity on purpose. But intent and effect are different questions, and the effect tracks wealth, population size, and geography closely enough that intent may not be the most useful test to apply. What is left, once the artistic reasoning and the industrial explanations are accounted for, is a simpler fact: a film built around one director’s insistence on a medium defined by its resistance to being reproduced will always be seen, in its fullest form, only by the people already positioned — by money, by location, or by the ability to book a flight to reach it.
