Nolan wanted the biggest canvas. IMAX had already moved on.
Christopher Nolan's first feature shot entirely in IMAX 70mm debuts in a marketplace that has thinned out the format his films made famous. The bottleneck is not directors. It is electricity, real estate, and a format that never hit double digits globally.
The widest frame in commercial cinema arrives in a shrinking one. On 17 July 2026, Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's "The Odyssey" opens across the United States, billed as the first feature film shot entirely in IMAX 70mm. Variety reported on 16 July that the rollout is constrained not by appetite but by infrastructure: according to IMAX, the number of locations capable of exhibiting the company's proprietary 70mm format remains small, and the company describes adding new ones as impractical.
The catch is structural, not aesthetic. Nolan spent fifteen years turning the 70mm IMAX frame into a marketing event. "The Dark Knight," "The Dark Knight Rises," "Interstellar," "Dunkirk" and "Oppenheimer" each carried 70mm sequences that cinephiles queued for and studios quietly resented. He made the format visible. He did not, however, make it scalable. What he built is a theatrical premium product competing for screens, projectors and audiences with a multiplex industry that has spent two decades consolidating the other way.
Why the bottleneck exists
The logistical answer is mundane. A 70mm IMAX screen runs roughly twice the height of a standard auditorium and weighs more than a freight container. According to Variety's reporting, the company requires between 600 and 1,000 kilowatts of power to run a single dual-projector 70mm setup; many venues simply cannot supply it. The screens also need to be purpose-built; few operators are willing to demolish existing auditoriums or absorb the capital cost. IMAX's own corporate communications, as relayed in Variety, called expansion "not practical" given the combination of real-estate constraints, electrical infrastructure and the format's narrow release window.
The number of true 70mm-capable screens globally has never broken out of the high teens. In the United States, fewer than ten locations were reliably booking Nolan's previous 70mm runs prior to "Oppenheimer"'s 2023 release, which briefly doubled that count through temporary retrofits. Most of those temporary screens have since reverted to standard digital IMAX or conventional projection. Nolan's films created a market for a format whose physical footprint he does not control. The screens belong to IMAX, and IMAX licenses them to exhibitors.
The counter-narrative from the studios
The industry's counter-argument is that Nolan is asking a question cinema has already answered. Major studios have spent twenty years pushing distribution toward digital workflows because digital is cheaper, faster and infinitely reproducible. A 70mm print costs roughly an order of magnitude more than a digital cinema package, requires a specialised projectionist and degrades if mishandled. Studios funding tentpole productions have little incentive to underwrite a format that serves a niche of cinephile audiences, however vocal. The Nolan-led 70mm revival, in this reading, is a vanity subsidy extracted from exhibitors and audiences willing to pay premiums the rest of the market would never bear.
There is something to that line. "Oppenheimer" is the only film in the past decade in which 70mm IMAX screenings meaningfully moved the global box office. Universal, which financed and distributed "Oppenheimer," publicly reported that 70mm engagements contributed a measurable share of opening-weekend grosses on a relative basis, even if the absolute numbers remained modest. Universal accepted the cost because Nolan's prestige premium on streaming-era exhibition is genuine. No other working director commands that premium, which is why no other working director can move the needle on 70mm screen count.
What the format actually costs
The numbers, what little IMAX has disclosed through press and Variety's reporting, point to a hard physical constraint. A dual-projector 70mm IMAX installation can run north of several million dollars once structural reinforcement, electrical upgrades and acoustic treatment are included. Operators recover the cost only when premium-format pricing premiums stick, which they rarely do outside event releases. IMAX's published financials over the last decade have favoured a digital-led rollout model: standard IMAX Laser, IMAX with Laser at scale, and a smaller flagship-network strategy that treats 70mm as a brand asset rather than a growth lever.
The "not practical" line, in other words, is not a refusal. It is a description of capital allocation. Nolan wants more 70mm screens. IMAX's investors want predictable recurring revenue. Those two priorities collide whenever a new 70mm film is greenlit, and they have collided every time since "The Dark Knight."
Stakes for the rest of the year
The release matters beyond Nolan's reputation. "The Odyssey" lands in a marketplace where premium-format differentiation is one of the few remaining levers exhibitors can pull to defend per-ticket revenue against streaming substitution. AMC, Regal and Cinemark, the three largest North American chains, have spent the past two years publicly reframing their proposition around large-format auditoriums, reclined seating and event-style programming. A Nolan release with a 70mm component sharpens that pitch. The question is whether enough screens survive to make the pitch stick in cities that did not retrofit in 2023.
Nolan's leverage inside that dynamic is unusual. He is one of the few directors for whom studios will accept a 70mm-first exhibition plan against their own commercial instincts. The format's continued visibility, in turn, sustains the handful of projectionists and laboratory technicians whose craft is otherwise being absorbed into digital pipelines. If "The Odyssey" under-performs at the 70mm mark, expect less of the format on his next film. If it sells out, IMAX will hold the line for another release cycle and the bottleneck will reset, unchanged.
The honest reading is that Nolan is renting theatre-space from a company whose business model no longer accommodates his preferred canvas. The format survives because he insists on it. The format does not expand because he cannot compel the expansion alone, and IMAX does not intend to be moved.
Desk note: Monexus treated IMAX's infrastructure and capital-allocation positioning as the structural frame, rather than positioning the rollout as a Nolan-versus-IMAX dispute. The story is less about a single director than about who gets to define theatrical premium in a distribution system that consolidated around digital two decades ago.