No new IMAX film projector has rolled off a production line in roughly 50 years. Every odd thing about buying an IMAX ticket today — the sellouts, the cross-country drives, the panic on resale sites — comes back to that single fact.
Speaking to Variety, IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond confirmed that the company hasn’t built a new film projector in about half a century. The industry’s wholesale shift to digital finished the job: blueprints went missing, component suppliers moved on, and the engineers who understood the machines retired. Building one from the ground up is now next to impossible, which is why the company keeps refurbishing the surviving antiques instead.
Reportedly, only around 90 people in the world know how to operate them.
The 70mm numbers are unforgiving
Roughly 1,800 IMAX screens are in operation globally. Of those, only 32 in North America and 41 worldwide can project the company’s 70mm film format, and the bulk of them are clustered in a few big metro areas. That has pushed some American film fans to drive 500 or more miles to see The Odyssey in the format it was shot for.
Since 2023, the exhibitor has brought 11 more 70mm theaters online. With Christopher Nolan’s film sitting at $346 million and still climbing, the case for adding more has never been stronger.
It’s not simply a larger screen — it’s a different shape
Conventional auditoriums favor screens that are wide and short. IMAX trades those familiar proportions for 1:90:1 in digital houses or 1:43:1 on film — meaning the screen is proportionally taller relative to its width. Closer to a square, in other words. The whole point of the geometry is to push the picture beyond the edges of your peripheral vision.
In a 70mm house, the screen measures 59 feet high by 79 feet wide.
What you see isn’t the same image blown up, either. Movies captured on IMAX cameras record a bigger picture in the first place, so each frame holds detail a standard camera never captured at all.
Filmmakers have to shoot for a screen that shifts shape
Nolan, who directed The Odyssey, told the Associated Press that the wider field of view creates genuine puzzles on set. “We have to plan very carefully because by shooting an IMAX film, you capture a lot of information,” he said. “Your movie is going to translate very well to all the formats because you’re getting the ultimate amount of visual information. But there are different shapes to the screen . . .What you have to plan is how you then frame your imagery so that it can be presented in different theaters with equal success.”
Digital productions face the same challenge. Composing for IMAX’s two aspect ratios can’t be solved by pulling back and cropping later in post. Lenses, lighting and the sound design all get tuned so the material holds up in IMAX rooms and ordinary ones alike. Productions carrying the “Filmed for IMAX” label take it further, collaborating with the exhibitor throughout the shoot, and IMAX hands over its own toolkit — digital remastering software included — to clean images up for a canvas this large.
The logo on the door doesn’t guarantee the same experience
Chances are the IMAX closest to you is a digital one, and that label spans a broad quality spectrum. IMAX Digital is the most widespread version, often a converted auditorium tucked inside a Cinemark, Dolby, AMC or Regal. Its twin xenon lamp projectors deliver the 1:90:1 ratio but fall short of the resolution IMAX’s other setups achieve.
Then come the laser systems, where the branding gets genuinely confusing. Laser GT pairs two 4K projectors and delivers the floor-to-ceiling proportions IMAX built its name on, along with sharper resolution and a broader color range. Elsewhere, IMAX rooms use a single laser projector and stop at 1:90:1. A single laser still outperforms xenon on brightness and contrast, so it’s a step up — just not the step the signage suggests.
A 70mm print tips the scales at 500 pounds and costs $80,000
Wide-gauge film is hardly a recent invention — Stanley Kubrick used 70mm for 2001: A Space Odyssey decades back. IMAX’s innovation was orientation: the film travels horizontally through the projector instead of vertically, a process repeated three times over, which raises the perforations along each frame’s edge from the usual five to 15.
The physical consequences border on ridiculous. The Odyssey’s reels stretch beyond 10 miles, tip the scales at roughly 500 pounds, and race through the projector at hundreds of miles per hour. Each of Nolan’s 70mm prints reportedly carried an $80,000 price tag.
The director has described the format’s clarity and sharpness as “unparalleled” and called it the “best that celluloid film ever got.” The credit, he says, belongs to “its massive film negative,” which he characterized as “a huge roll of film that runs through the projector at hundreds of miles an hour.” Since IMAX relies on an emulsion to render the image, additional surface area translates directly into a better picture. By the company’s own accounting, its 70mm prints are 10 times clearer than a standard 35mm projector — about 18,000 pixels per frame.
The difference is easier to see than to describe
Aspect ratios don’t mean much written out as figures. The Odyssey’s official site offers a tool that runs the trailer through each of the formats, and that side-by-side comparison communicates more than any list of specifications.
A record year for IMAX, a rough one for everyone else
Ticket sales across the board flatlined at $8.9 billion in 2025, about $2.5 billion below the pre-pandemic peak of $11.4 billion. IMAX went the other direction entirely, logging the strongest year in its history with sales climbing roughly 40 percent year over year.
The same divide is playing out in 2026. Premium-format draws such as Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey have put the American box office on track for its best showing since 2019, even with theaters reportedly moving only about two-thirds of their tickets. Moviegoers are already locking in IMAX seats for Dune: Part 3, and that one doesn’t open until December.
There’s no single reason for the gap. Visually maximalist, big-budget spectacle is precisely what IMAX rooms were designed to show, and those are the titles still filling seats. Climbing ticket and concession prices have also turned an evening at the cinema into an occasion. When you only go four or five times a year, putting that money toward the premium screening begins to look like the sensible move.
Finding one that justifies the trip
Consult IMAX’s online locator before you spend anything. It shows which theaters are nearest, what amenities they offer and — the part that matters — what film format they run, which is the only reliable way to tell Laser GT from a single laser projector or a retrofitted xenon room wearing an IMAX sign.
Look at that format field first. The gap between the best IMAX ticket and the worst one is wider than the gap between a poor IMAX ticket and the regular screen down the corridor — and both of them will charge you extra.