IMAX isn’t a new development, but it wasn’t designed with Hollywood cinema in mind. The first IMAX film, Tiger Child, was a Japanese short film released in 1970, with a later film, North of Superior, used in 1971 to more widely showcase the format. Its early years were dominated by documentaries, educational films and more short films to showcase IMAX’s huge screen size and high-resolution detail.
It’s not a platform that has ever seen a huge amount of adoption. Shooting an IMAX film has always required bigger and more cumbersome equipment. Modern IMAX film cameras are still larger and heavier than their traditional counterparts, and are louder to operate, adding extra difficulty on a film set where clean audio is a necessity. Their size and general bulkiness make them an impractical option for a lot of scenes. You’re not taking an IMAX camera with you if you’re filming on a small set, or if you need to film fast-paced action scenes, for example.
IMAX film itself is big and bulky, too. The 65-70mm size is much larger than traditional 35mm film, which gives it its impressive quality, but the camera physically can’t hold as much. That means regular film changes, a problem faced by Tom Holland on The Odyssey film set, who mistook the regular three-minute stoppages for film changes as a critique on his performance. Given the filming schedule for a Hollywood movie, extra stoppages like this simply add to the cost.
So, to film in IMAX, you’ll need specialist cameras that are bulky and harder to film with, require expensive film, and can lead to a longer film schedule. Even newer IMAX cameras, like the quieter 65mm IMAX Keighley camera used in The Odyssey, are still bulky to operate, weighing almost 400 pounds. Most movie theaters can’t show true IMAX screens in the original 15/70 format, so the true experience is reserved to a much smaller set of cinema screens. Some digital cameras are now IMAX-certified, but these don’t deliver the same quality as traditional 15/70 IMAX film.
As a result, most filmmakers have chosen to use IMAX selectively. The Dark Knight, another Christopher Nolan movie, was the first major Hollywood film to use IMAX for some of its scenes, reserving it for parts of the film that he believed its impressive detail would have the biggest impact. Nolan, however, is a rarity. Most producers aren’t willing to accept the trade-offs and additional costs, while others more typically go down the IMAX-certified digital route instead.
