POV: you watched The Odyssey at a regular movie theater and you’re feeling increasingly bitter that you didn’t get to experience the epic on IMAX 70 mm. The movie—which was shot entirely on IMAX film cameras—is playing in IMAX theaters across the United States, but the problem? There are only 25 of them.
So, why aren’t the powers that be at IMAX adding more screens?
“We’re sold out in some theaters into the fifth week already,” IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond explained to Variety. “There’s certainly more demand. The problem is they haven’t made new IMAX film projectors in about 50 years. So we retrofit them, rebuild them, and part of our strategy is to see how far we can take it. But certainly, demand-driven, I’d like to see more.”
He added, “We build new projectors every day, but film projectors using this film—it’s just not practical. Can all 2,000 of our theaters be film projectors? No. There’s just not that many around. But I think we can continue to grow it.”
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According to sources who spoke to Variety, the projectors are so complex that some of the parts needed for them “simply no longer exist” since the original designs were created decades ago. The outlet reports that “very few engineers working today fully understand the systems,” and that it took IMAX an entire year ahead of The Odyssey to find and retrofit broken projectors in order to have 41 locations ready worldwide (up from 30).
Here’s a video of just how complicated it is to even set up the film to be viewed in the theaters that do exist:
Here’s where to find IMAX theaters if you want to experience The Odyssey in all its glory.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.cosmopolitan.com ’
