Christopher Nolan shot The Odyssey on Imax 70 mm film. Moviegoers are now crossing state lines to stare at a marginally bigger screen. They're paying triple the normal ticket price for what amounts to watching the same movie but squinting less.
Imax 70 mm theaters exist in maybe thirty locations nationwide. The scarcity has created a secondary market where people brag about securing tickets like they just flipped an NFT at the top. They post their confirmation emails on Reddit. They compare drive times. A man in Kansas City apparently flew to Los Angeles for this. He spent $600 on airfare to watch a film projected on celluloid instead of hard drive.
The technical difference is real. Imax 70 mm offers higher resolution and a taller aspect ratio. It's objectively superior to digital projection. But we're talking about a movie adaptation of a 2,800-year-old poem. Homer did not specify a minimum pixel density. The story works fine on your phone. People watched Lawrence of Arabia on VHS for decades and survived.
Nolan has trained an entire generation of film nerds to fetishize delivery mechanism over content. They don't care if the movie is good. They care if it was shot on the correct type of expensive plastic. They'll sit through three hours of Brad Pitt reading a grocery list if it was captured at 15 perforations per frame.
The real story is what this says about artificial scarcity. Imax could install more 70 mm projectors. They won't. Keeping the format rare keeps it premium. Nolan could shoot on digital and save everyone the trouble. He won't. The inconvenience is the point. Moviegoers could just wait two months and stream it at home. But they won't, because then they'd have nothing to post about.
Somewhere a retail trader is explaining to his wife why he needs to drive four hours to see a movie in the correct grain structure.
Photo by Fiona Feng on Unsplash
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