The first feature shot entirely on IMAX film cameras can be seen as its director intended on only six screens in Europe. One of them is in Brussels, so we went to find out what the difference really is.

One of six screens in Europe

The lights go down in Kinepolis Brussels’ IMAX auditorium on the Heysel plateau, and the screen, 27 metres wide and 19 metres high, fills the room from floor to ceiling. Within minutes, the feeling is less of watching a film and more of being inside it.

Cultura Impact Lab went to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm. We wanted to understand, first-hand, what a technology invented more than fifty years ago can still teach us about innovation in culture. To answer that, we first need to look at how IMAX works.

What is IMAX 70mm?

IMAX stands for Image Maximum, and the aim is right there in the name: to push image quality as far as it can go.

A Canadian invention. IMAX was born in Canada in 1967, when filmmakers Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor and Robert Kerr, with engineer William Shaw, founded the company that would become IMAX Corporation. The first IMAX film, Tiger Child, was made for Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan, and the first permanent IMAX theatre opened in 1971 at the Cinesphere in Toronto. More than half a century later, the same principle is back at the centre of the film industry.

Most films have historically been shot on 35mm film, which runs vertically through the camera, with each frame about four perforations tall. IMAX engineers turned this logic sideways. In IMAX, 65mm negative runs horizontally, so each frame is 15 perforations long. This is the format known as 15/70. Each projected frame measures 70mm × 48.5mm, roughly nine to ten times the area of a standard 35mm frame.

In practice, this means:

• Resolution: translated into digital terms, an IMAX film frame is estimated at up to 16–18K, or 12–18K by some estimates. Standard digital cinema projects at 2K or 4K.
• Shape: the native image is 1.43:1, taller and almost square, filling the viewer’s peripheral vision.
• Look: the large negative gives a very shallow depth of field, so wide shots can still isolate a character against a soft background.

What changes with The Odyssey

Nolan has used IMAX film cameras since The Dark Knight, but only for selected sequences. The reason was noise: IMAX cameras are so loud that dialogue scenes usually had to be shot in other formats or re-dubbed later. Oppenheimer could not be shot entirely in IMAX for this reason.

The Odyssey (2026) is the first feature film shot entirely on IMAX film cameras. Two innovations made that possible:

• The IMAX Keighley camera, a new generation that is smaller and quieter than its predecessors, with a re-engineered film transport. It is named after David Keighley, IMAX’s late chief quality officer. In Nolan’s words: “You can be shooting a foot from [an actor’s] face while they’re whispering and get usable sound.”
• A sound-proof “blimp”, an acoustic housing built by IMAX. The blimp alone weighs about 300 lbs (≈136 kg), and the full camera package just under 400 lbs (≈180 kg). Because the housing was so bulky, the crew used mirrors so that actors could look straight into the lens during dialogue.

Behind the scenes: the technical side

• Film shot: over two million feet (about 610 km) of 15-perf 65mm negative, on Kodak Vision3 250D and 500T stocks.
• Only 2.5–3 minutes per reel: an IMAX camera holds about 300 metres of film, roughly three minutes of footage.
• 91 shooting days across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland and the United States.
• Hand-made editing: the negative was cut and joined physically, with glue, as in the pre-digital era.
• A projection print weighing hundreds of kilos: the Brussels copy weighs 385 kg and is 17.4 km long.
• Projectors from another era: an analogue IMAX projector weighs around two tonnes or more, uses a 15 kW water-cooled xenon lamp, and holds the film flat against the lens with a vacuum system. IMAX has not built new film projectors in about 50 years, so cinemas rebuild existing units. In Brussels, the system weighs about 2.5 tonnes, and the floor had to be reinforced.
• New skills: some 60 new projectionists were trained for the release.

The economics of going analogue

• Production: The Odyssey has an estimated budget of $250 million. The film stock alone cost about $3 million, and footage can cost up to $2,000 per minute.
• Box office: about $1.78 billion worldwide as of mid-October 2026. Its global IMAX opening weekend of $52 million was the biggest in IMAX’s history, about 20% of the film’s worldwide opening.
• Demand: tickets for the IMAX 70mm screenings went on sale a full year before release. An IMAX spokesperson said: “We’ve never seen demand for IMAX Film on this scale.”
• The cinema’s side: IMAX keeps its figures confidential, but Belgian press estimates suggest that an IMAX 70mm installation represents an investment of several million euros. A ticket in Belgium costs around €30, about twice a normal ticket. By late summer, Kinepolis Brussels had sold just over 85,000 IMAX 70mm tickets (including presales through 22 September). IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond notes that such installations pay off only at a limited number of sites and over long runs.

Six screens for a continent

Of the 41 IMAX 70mm screens worldwide that could show The Odyssey, only six are in Europe:

#	Cinema	City	Address
1	BFI IMAX	London, UK	1 Charlie Chaplin Walk, South Bank, SE1 8XR
2	IMAX: The Ronson Theatre, Science Museum	London, UK	Exhibition Road, SW7 2DD
3	Vue Manchester Printworks IMAX	Manchester, UK	The Printworks, corner of Withy Grove and Corporation Street
4	Kinepolis Brussels IMAX	Brussels, Belgium	Boulevard du Centenaire 20, 1020 Brussels (Heysel)
5	IMAX Theatre Palác Flora (Cinema City)	Prague, Czech Republic	Vinohradská 151, 130 00 Prague
6	Pathé Montpellier Odysseum IMAX (formerly Gaumont Multiplexe)	Montpellier, France	235 rue Georges Méliès, 34000 Montpellier

Kinepolis Brussels is the only such screen in the Benelux, and Montpellier is the only one in France. There are none in Italy, Germany or Spain: Italian IMAX screens, for example, are all digital.

IMAX film vs IMAX digital. Since 2008, IMAX has expanded into multiplexes with digital projectors. These are excellent, but they work at 2K–4K and usually crop the image to about 1.90:1, so the top and bottom of the original frame are lost.

The spectator’s experience

What did we notice in the room?

• An augmented experience. The screen’s height and sharpness pull you into the image. It feels like being inside the film rather than in front of it.
• A different audience from art-house cinema. The audience was far more varied than at an auteur screening, and the venue is built around concessions: in our auditorium, the people without popcorn or snacks could be counted on one hand. (Even IMAX’s camera-shaped popcorn bucket sold out.)
• Booking is a must. Screenings in Brussels sold out week after week. Extra screenings added for the end of August were full within days, and sessions remained nearly sold out until late September.
• Cinema tourism. Scarcity has turned the format into a reason to travel. According to Kinepolis, about 10% of the Brussels IMAX 70mm audience in the opening days came from abroad, mostly from neighbouring countries. Dutch audiences travelled to Brussels in large numbers, and in Prague, according to Forbes Czech, the IMAX screen welcomed viewers from 16 countries.
• The format matters. Verified audience reviews repeatedly recommend seeing the film “on the biggest screen possible”. After our screening, we share that view: seen on a standard screen, a TV or a laptop, much of the enormous work behind this film is lost.

Hype, or a new frontier for cinema?

Is this a passing hype or a new frontier? Probably neither, and both. The most talked-about innovation of the year relies on chemistry, mechanics and craft skills: celluloid, hand-cut negatives, projectors rebuilt from spare parts, and projectionists trained again.

For Cultura Impact Lab, this is exactly where culture meets innovation. Innovation is not always about the newest tool. Sometimes it means rediscovering an “old” technology and pushing it to its limits, and preserving the know-how that makes it possible. It also raises questions for the cultural sector: access (six screens for a whole continent), cost (a ticket at around €30), and the role of cinemas as places for an experience that cannot be replicated at home.