Why you’re probably not watching The Odyssey in ‘real’ IMAX | Explained

The big picture: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened this week as the first feature-length film in cinema history shot entirely with IMAX’s proprietary cameras, captured on 65mm negative and printed for exhibition on 70mm stock, yet only a few dozen theatres worldwide can show it that way. Everywhere else, audiences are watching a digital stand-in for a negative built for something else, in set-ups cinephiles have long nicknamed ‘Liemax’. That matters more for this film than almost any other, and understanding why requires separating what IMAX actually is from the brand that has grown up around it.Why Is IMAX bigger than regular cinema?Aspect ratio, the ratio of a frame width to its height, is where all of this starts. Most films today are shown at either 1.85:1 (’flat’) or 2.39:1, often rounded to 2.40:1 and generally called ‘scope’, both wide rectangles that are cropped or letterboxed to fit inside an ordinary cinema screen. IMAX runs the other way, at 1.43:1, a frame closer to square that fills far more of the screen vertically.Cinema’s default unit of measurement for most of the twentieth century was 35mm film: a photochemical strip that runs vertically through a camera, with part of its width given over to the sprocket perforations that pull it along. More surface area on the negative means more captured detail, which is why studios periodically reached for a bigger frame whenever they needed to compete for an audience’s attention. Raoul Walsh used 70mm for the frontier vistas of 1930’s The Big Trail. However, by the 1950s, the television boom forced the industry’s hand: the large-format epics of the 1960s, Lawrence of Arabia and The Sound of Music among them, proved that a bigger negative and better sound could still pull people out of their living rooms.It was against that backdrop that Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor, Robert Kerr, and William C. Shaw developed IMAX in Canada, founding Multiscreen Corporation in 1967 and refining the format through the early 1970s. Their key innovation was turning the frame sideways. Standard 70mm film runs vertically through a projector. IMAX runs it horizontally, with fifteen perforations pulling each frame through the gate instead of the usual four, using a ‘Rolling Loop’ transport mechanism. That orientation lets each IMAX frame measure roughly 70mm by 48mm, with estimates varying by source but commonly put at eight to ten times the area of a 35mm frame, which is why an IMAX negative is often quoted, loosely, as equivalent to somewhere between 12K and 18K digitally, against roughly 4K for 35mm and 8K for standard 70mm. Paired with screens that can run over 24 mt tall, the result is an image built to fill the entire human field of view rather than sit inside it.Are all IMAX theatres really the same?That level of fidelity in true IMAX comes at a cost most exhibitors were never going to pay. A 65mm IMAX camera is loud and heavy to operate, fifteen-perforation film burns through the gate too fast to record clean dialogue nearby, and a purpose-built IMAX auditorium needs a screen and projection booth most multiplexes do not have room for. So, through the 2000s, as films such as The Dark Knight, Interstellar, and Dunkirk made ‘shot on IMAX’ a genuine box-office draw, IMAX Corporation grew the brand a different way: by licensing a digital projection system, starting in 2008, into ordinary multiplex auditoriums. That original system used two 2K digital projectors and a cropped 1.90:1 image on screens a fraction of the size of a purpose-built IMAX house, yet carried the same name and the same surcharge. Film enthusiasts started calling these rooms ‘Liemax’ as early as the early 2010s, objecting less to digital projection itself than to a discount version and the flagship experience being sold under one label at one price.IMAX has since moved much of its digital estate onto ‘IMAX with Laser’, a family of 4K systems that varies by installation. The dual-projector ‘GT Laser’ can fill a full-size 1.43:1 screen, while the smaller single-projector ‘CoLa’ and ‘XT’ systems remain limited to the cropped 1.90:1 ratio. All are a clear improvement on the original 2K rooms, brighter and sharper, though none matches the tonal range of a photochemical print. Today, there are roughly 1,800 IMAX-branded screens worldwide, and only a few dozen are true 70mm film houses; the rest split between these newer laser tiers and the older 2K digital screens that gave the format its unflattering nickname in the first place.One part of the experience holds up better across the tiers than the picture does: IMAX auditoriums, digital or film, run a proprietary discrete audio system rather than a standard cinema surround format, a six-track layout on older installations extending to twelve discrete channels on the largest rooms, with soundtracks remastered specifically for IMAX’s own calibration standard and played through point-source speakers designed to make sound appear to originate from the action itself. The caveat is that the smaller, cost-effective laser systems installed in many multiplexes commonly run a reduced channel count rather than the full twelve, so even the audio side of the brand is not entirely uniform.India currently has exactly one operating true 70mm IMAX screen, and you still cannot buy a ticket to a Hollywood film on it. That screen is the dome theatre at Science City near Ahmedabad in Gujarat, which opened in 2002 with a 96-by-67-foot, 1.43:1 analogue 15/70 installation, one of the country’s earliest large-format screens. It is still running actual 70mm film today, but the cost of importing prints has kept it limited to space and nature documentaries for years.Meanwhile, Prasads IMAX in Hyderabad, once one of the country’s flagship 70mm houses (it screened Interstellar in full 1.43:1), dropped the IMAX brand in 2014, unable to keep up with licensing and print costs. Gujarat’s only IMAX with Laser installation, at PVR’s Palladium multiplex in Ahmedabad, opened in 2024 and is indeed showing The Odyssey, but at the cropped 1.90:1 ratio rather than the film’s native 1.43:1 frame, the same trade-off audiences in Mumbai and every other Indian city are making this week.What innovations made The Odyssey possible on IMAX?The Odyssey sits directly on that gap between ‘IMAX’ the brand and IMAX the technical standard. No filmmaker had shot an entire feature on fifteen-perforation IMAX film before, because the mechanical noise made synchronised, close-up dialogue impossible. Even Nolan’s own Oppenheimer, shot partly on a bespoke IMAX 65mm black-and-white stock developed with Kodak for its ‘Fission’ sequences, and Ryan Coogler’s 2025 Sinners used other film stocks for their dialogue-heavy scenes, reserving true IMAX for wordless spectacle.For The Odyssey, IMAX built a new camera named the Keighley, after the company’s long-serving chief quality officer David Keighley (who died on August 28, 2025) and his wife Patricia, who continues in the role of IMAX’s chief quality guru. The Keighley camera body is reportedly 15 to 20% quieter than its predecessors, featuring a carbon-fibre shell and a digital LCD readout. For the closest dialogue scenes, the production added a heavily insulated acoustic housing, nicknamed ‘the blimp,’ which reportedly brought the whole rig to roughly 300 pounds; the housing was so bulky that actors needed a custom double-mirror rig just to maintain eye contact around it. The resulting footage was cut and colour-corrected without a digital intermediate, and the release prints were struck directly from the negative by chemical process, a production pipeline almost nobody has used at feature length in decades.Universal and IMAX struck only a limited run of 70mm prints for the release, and reported counts of participating cinemas moved from the mid-twenties to the mid-forties depending on the week, as more venues came online in the run-up to release. Every other IMAX auditorium showing The Odyssey, and every standard multiplex screen besides, is showing a digital conversion of a negative that was never meant to be converted.Which IMAX version should you choose?If accuracy to the original negative matters to you, the hierarchy is straightforward: a true 70mm IMAX print beats a full-screen ‘IMAX with Laser’ presentation at 1.43:1, which in turn beats a cropped, single-projector laser or older 2K digital IMAX screen, the system that earned the ‘Liemax’ label in the first place.Hollywood has been on this track since the 1950s: build something large as an antidote to whatever is stealing audiences this decade (television then, streaming now). The real question is whether audiences will care about the gap between the ‘Liemax’ and IMAX 70mm versions of The Odyssey. Given that Denis Villeneuve has already used the Keighley camera on Dune: Part Three, this level of commitment to photochemical film may become slightly less rare.