The movies are so back.
Try to buy a theatre ticket for Christopher Nolan’s newest epic, The Odyssey, on the biggest screen available, and you’ll be lucky to get one in the front row weeks from now. Film nerds rejoice: it’s the first movie to be shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film, the format boasting the highest resolution and biggest screens.
It’s an experience audiences seem to think is worth paying for. IMAX theatres accounted for 20 percent of The Odyssey’s global box office debut, which marked IMAX’s biggest opening weekend ever in its home country of Canada, according to the company’s global president, Mark Welton. It’s an experience he says will have “plenty of legs” as audiences return to the theatre to marvel at it all over again.
Yes, IMAX is Canadian. The company was founded in Canada and first debuted its film technology at the 1967 Montréal Expo. Nearly 60 years later, and fresh off IMAX’s greatest success story, BetaKit sat down with Welton to learn more about the technology’s Canadian roots, how it’s innovating in Canada, and the Canadian who shaped many of Christopher Nolan’s greatest films.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IMAX is a Canadian innovation. Can you tell us a bit more about its Canadian roots?
IMAX was founded back in 1967 by four founders out in the Cambridge and Mississauga area. At the time, we invented the 15/70 camera and the 15/70 projection system, which was primarily housed in educational institutions and showed educational movies for schools and tourists. The company was bought in the 1990s by our current CEO and an investment banking company, and that’s when we started to transition into Hollywood films.
How did IMAX become the global phenomenon it is today?
We’re an ecosystem; there are so many different spokes to our brand and to our company. We had to basically do two major things.
One, we had to get into Hollywood, where there are two major parties: the studios and the exhibitors. We had to transform our business so that the exhibitors wanted to open up theatres, thus giving IMAX a theatre network and giving the studios a place to show their blockbusters.
Two, back in the early 2000s, we developed a digital remastering technology, which transformed Hollywood movies shot with 35 millimetre film or digitally into the IMAX format. That allowed us to get a number of movies available for theatres, and then we went and partnered with theatre exhibitors. So, instead of building educational, institutional, standalone theatres, we partnered with our exhibitors, like Cineplex Canada, took over the largest auditoriums, then redesigned the auditoriums with our architects and designers here in Canada to make it a very immersive, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling screen with our projection and sound technology.
That allowed us to show the Hollywood blockbusters through our exhibitors’ businesses and complexes. That all came together to become a very good business for the studios, for the exhibitors, and for IMAX, resulting in close to 1,900 locations across 91 countries around the world.
There are still very few IMAX theatres capable of projecting 70mm film. Can you explain what the bottleneck is?
We have increased our number of IMAX film locations this year for The Odyssey. We had approximately 30 IMAX film locations for Oppenheimer three years ago, and now we have 41.
There are a few reasons why. This is a specific format. Not to get too technical, but it’s a 1.43:1 aspect ratio format. So again, very large screens, sometimes four, five, six stories high. There’s no one building those complexes. We partner with our exhibitors who license to install our technology, and we take a cut of the box office, so that’s why there are very few, if any, of these iconic large auditoriums being built. The 41 film locations are existing complexes that were built back in the early 2000s.
The second thing is these film projectors are 50 years old; parts are obsolete, there are some drawings we don’t have for them, so for the 41 locations we’re putting together different parts to ensure that we have the capability if a film system goes down.
It’s a great format for what we’re doing today, but it’s a little more difficult to be able to build these projection systems and build these theatres around the world, but we are going to look into that. That’s our next project: is there a way to redesign our film projection technology as we did with our film cameras for Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey?
I was just about to ask: The Odyssey is the first film shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film. What innovations were needed to make that possible?
This was very exciting, and actually innovated and redesigned here in our Canadian office in Mississauga, which is our technology hub for IMAX.
This is a historic achievement made possible by our new film cameras, the Keighleys. We took our older film cameras, which are, again, 50 to 60 years old, and redesigned them. We made them quieter, we made them lighter, we made them easier to move around. That allowed Christopher Nolan to shoot in mountains, deserts, or on the sea. He took it across six countries around the world.
RELATED: IMAX acquires video quality solutions startup Ssimwave in $28.3 million CAD deal
The second thing was what Chris Nolan and his team have called the game changer. We introduced and developed a groundbreaking ‘blimp’ system: a film enclosure that goes over the film camera, allowing Chris to capture intimate dialogue between two actors.
Even though our film camera has been used previously a number of times, especially by Chris, Ryan Coogler, and Denis Villeneuve, it was never used for 100 percent of a movie because it was just too loud for dialogue. So, with developing our new cameras, which we made quieter, as well as the sound blimp that enclosed the camera, it allowed Chris to shoot intimate dialogue on the most beautiful format ever.
You mentioned the new camera is called the Keighley. The Odyssey includes a dedication to David Keighley, a Canadian IMAX executive who died last year. Can you tell me about his contribution to IMAX and film?
David created our post-production company 50 years ago. He and his wife, Patricia Keighley, took care of all the post-production at the time of educational movies. They made sure that the capture of the images was put into the film format and then transferred into our iconic locations around the world.
He created a very close personal and business relationship with Chris Nolan and his wife and producer Emma Thomas, back when they started on The Dark Knight. David has always been a very important partner of Chris when Chris used our film cameras to shoot The Dark Knight, Inception, Dunkirk. David worked on The Odyssey right until the end. It was a great contribution and a partnership that Chris and Emma cherished, along with Patricia Keighley, and it was nice to have that dedication to him.
Why has IMAX continued to work in Canada?
IMAX is a Canadian brand. I think people are very proud of the brand. It started here. The first permanent IMAX theatre was at Ontario Place in 1971, so there have been a lot of people who grew up with IMAX and understand the principles of IMAX technology, quality, and innovation. They understand that, and I think they’ve passed that down to their children. There’s a very good understanding of the IMAX brand in Canada. We have nine 70mm film theatres here, and they’re located from Halifax all the way to Vancouver.
You mentioned earlier that there’s a lot of innovation happening at your Mississauga HQ. What is IMAX working on? What’s next?
We’re always working to remain the premium, most immersive movie-going experience in the world. You always have to innovate. We continue to look at our sound; we’ll look at the design of our theatres. Now that Chris has used our cameras for The Odyssey, we’ll get feedback from him and see what else we need to elevate. Can we make them even quieter? Can we make them even lighter?
And again, we’ll look at our film projection. There’s nothing concrete, but we will look at if there is another generation of film projection that we could do.
Feature image courtesy IMAX via X.