Universal Pictures has announced on X that Christopher Nolan’s next film is The Odyssey, based on the classic Greek mythic story and will be filmed with “new IMAX film technology”. What exactly this is has not been officially confirmed but most are speculating that this refers to the new film cameras that IMAX has publicly said it’s been working on for the last few years.
Details of these new cameras were first revealed as far back as March 2024, in a live panel session at the NAB 2024 conference, which is freely available to watch on YouTube.
In the video, Bruce Markoe, the head of post-production at IMAX, revealed that the cameras are essentially a 21st-century update of the eight IMAX film cameras, which are now 25 years old.
Lighter and Quieter
The headline feature is that the cameras will be 30% quieter and will be lighter thanks to a carbon fiber construction. This is primarily good news for the shoulders of Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan’s cinematographer since 2014’s Interstellar, who is often seen balancing the larger IMAX camera on this back.
Lighter, quieter IMAX film cameras will enable directors to increase the number of shots they can use them for. Last summer’s blockbuster Oppenheimer had about 75 minutes of its three-hour runtime in the full-frame IMAX film 1.43:1 format, around the same as his previous film, Tenet, so there’s every chance that The Odyssey will see that increased.
The quieter operation could also help with the widespread complaints from some that certain scenes in Nolan’s films are inaudible. This has been explained to be due to the noisiness of the current IMAX cameras combined with Nolan’s reluctance to use automatic dialogue replacement (ADR).
Analogue Innards In A Digital Shell
Other camera improvements include a new hi-res five-inch full-color display and brighter digital and optical viewfinders and for the first time the ability for output to be monitored on-set over Wi-Fi on external devices such as tablets.
Markoe also revealed that the camera displays will also show frame lines for the native 1.43:1 IMAX film format and also IMAX 1.90:1 (used for all IMAX digital screens) and standard 2.40:1. Of course other aspect ratios are available and the display can be set up lines for whatever ratio is preferred.
The new cameras promise even greater film exposure stability and greater reliability. Marko said that internally the film camera movement is unchanged from the original design. IMAX realized that there was nothing they could improve on, which is impressive since they were designed 25 years ago.
High Demand For IMAX
In the video, Markoe also reveals the fascinating statistic that despite only 1.5% of theatres worldwide showing Interstellar in IMAX, it brought in 20% of the film’s revenue. This would only have increased following the recent highly successful 10th-anniversary re-release of Interstellar.
As you’ll know if you tried to get a ticket to see the film in its IMAX 15/70 glory, the appetite for seeing films in full 1.43:1 aspect ratio is huge. However, there are only 30 theaters worldwide that can show IMAX 1.43 (as these require an IMAX 15/70 film camera or an IMAX dual-laser projection system combined with a 1.43:1 screen) and the IMAX presentation even boasts that people take flights just to be able to see movies in that format. So while the new cameras are great news it’s somewhat disappointing that there is no indication that IMAX is looking to increase this number.
I also hold out hope that there will be more to this new technology than the cameras. In the presentation, there are hints that Kodak might be introducing some new type of film stock in 2025. As the large format film photographer Tyler Sheilds, says on the panel, the future of cinema needs to be “daring, bold and interesting.” In Oppenheimer Nolan broke new ground by getting Kodak to create black and white IMAX film for the first time which had not been done before, so with The Odyssey, I would expect to see him pushing technical boundaries once again.
