Every prediction of cinema’s death assumes all screens are interchangeable — that a film is the same commodity on a living-room panel as on a multiplex wall. Large-format projection is the standing refutation. While the mid-budget theatrical release erodes and studios funnel everything else to streaming, one slice of the exhibition business has not merely held its ground but raised its prices: the premium large-format screen, and IMAX above all. The moat is not the picture. It is the scarcity.

“Large format” is shorthand for a projection system built around a bigger image than the standard multiplex frame: taller aspect ratio, brighter light and, at the top, film shot and shown on 70mm stock rather than digital files. The distinction that matters is physical. IMAX runs two tiers — a widely installed digital laser system, and a genuinely rare 70mm film chain. Only around thirty 70mm IMAX projectors exist in the world; each print takes days to strike and needs a custom booth and a trained projectionist. That bottleneck is not a bug the company is racing to fix. It is the product.

The economics explain why. IMAX occupies a sliver of global screens — a rounding error against the total — yet routinely takes 15 to 25 percent of a tentpole’s opening-weekend gross, more when a filmmaker shoots for the format. In 2025 the company posted a record 1.28 billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales while the broader exhibition market flatlined. Scarcity does the work: a limited number of the best seats, sold weeks ahead, converts a movie from something you can catch any night into an event you have to schedule around.

The clearest proof is a director’s willingness to build a film around the constraint. Christopher Nolan shot his adaptation of Homer entirely on IMAX film, and the presale response was a stampede — the biggest first-day premium-format launch a major chain had seen in four years, ticketing sites buckling under the queue, 70mm runs selling out and extending for weeks. James Cameron engineered Avatar’s underwater spectacle for the same premium tier and delivered one of IMAX’s largest global openings ever. Even IMAX’s own documentaries, such as its James Webb telescope feature, exist to keep format-native content flowing when Hollywood does not supply it.

The challengers are circling. Dolby Cinema counters with deeper blacks and object-based sound; Cinemark’s XD undercuts on price; Disney used CinemaCon to unveil Infinity Vision, a certification it says could qualify roughly 5,500 screens against IMAX’s 1,800. But most of that competition targets the digital tier, where advantages are licensable and therefore copyable. The one thing none of them can manufacture is a celluloid supply chain nobody else maintains, plus a branded, expanding frame audiences have spent decades being trained to seek out. Premium formats prove that theatrical demand was never dead — it was mispriced.

Nolan’s Odyssey opened on 17 July 2026, and its 70mm engagements were held over into September as shows kept selling out. The whole apparatus turns on a few dozen projectors and three-day prints — a deliberate bottleneck that most industries would call a liability and this one calls a moat.

Tags: Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, The Odyssey, IMAX, 70mm, large-format

The IMAX moat: how 30 film projectors became cinema’s last defensible edge

More Like This

Nolan bets the theatrical event on ‘The Odyssey’ and an A-list armada behind Matt Damon

Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Didn’t Go Broke — and the AI ‘Fix’ Is the Real Desecration

PVR Inox’s Bijli turns India’s record $1.48BN box office into theatrical’s counter-argument

IMAX Delivers Second Biggest Global Opening of All Time with Massive $48.8 Million Debut of James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water”

Why Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ is Already Dividing Scholars: The End of Mythological Cinema?

Studio chiefs hedge on the Paramount-Warner merger as creator-native hitmakers refill cinemas

Discussion