Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is the first film shot from start to finish in full-frame IMAX – a landmark moment for the premium large format of choice. And it turns out Nolan had been dreaming about making a movie this way since he was just 16 years old.
Speaking to Pay or Wait over on YouTube, Nolan explained how the process of shooting The Odyssey on IMAX film has evolved even since his experience making Oppenheimer just a few years ago. But he also revealed a fascinating tidbit about his first encounter with IMAX 40 years ago.
"It's something I've really wanted to do since I was 16 and I first saw an IMAX film at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago," Nolan recalls. "I was like, 'Well, why can't you make a dramatic feature, an action film, an adventure film this way, because the format is so incredible.'"
Now, you might be thinking: "Isn't IMAX a recent thing?" Not exactly. The company was founded in 1967, and first developed IMAX theatre projection standards in the late 60s and early 70s. So IMAX has been around for almost 60 years at this stage. For decades, however, it was the reserve of documentaries and experiential shorts; releasing Hollywood movies in the IMAX format is a more recent development. The first theatrical movie released in IMAX was Fantasia 2000 in, well, 2000, while the 2003 Matrix sequels were among the first live-action movies to go through the IMAX process.
Nolan saw the future at a very young age, then, and finally realized his dream with The Dark Knight in 2008 – the first of his movies to feature sequences shot for IMAX screens. Now, he's practically synonymous with IMAX, with Oppenheimer and The Odyssey selling out on IMAX screens across the UK and US, particularly in the very few theaters globally equipped to project the film in IMAX 70mm.
As for the decision to shoot one of his movies entirely on IMAX film for the first time, Nolan says The Odyssey was a story that justified the challenge. "It's like, we're going to make a film of The Odyssey. That's the movie… if ever you were going to film a story completely on IMAX, you know, this is the story to do it with."
With The Odyssey now a little over two weeks away, interviews have started to trickle out from Nolan and his cast. Speaking to the New York Times last month, Nolan made an interesting comparison between Matt Damon's Odysseus and a key Star Wars character. "Odysseus is a very complex character – a trickster, somebody who's smart and wily. In Star Wars terms, it's Han Solo – but Han Solo is not the hero of Star Wars, it's Luke Skywalker."
The Odyssey arrives in theaters on July 17, 2026. Check out our ranking of the best Christopher Nolan movies and keep up with all of the new movies heading your way.
