CHICAGO — After a mere twelve days in theaters, Christopher Nolan’s historical fantasy epic “The Odyssey” has grossed over $700 million globally. Much of that is due to the massive scale of the nearly three-hours-long film, which adapts Homer’s 3,000-year-old Greek epic about the hero Odysseus and his epic journey to return home to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War.
The sprawling tale required a $250 million budget, years of filming and a massive all-star cast that includes Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson, to name just a few.
To achieve that scale, Nolan chose to shoot “The Odyssey” entirely on IMAX cameras, a feat that has never previously been attempted due to its technical limitations. But the film is here and film fans, particularly in Chicago, are scrambling to figure out what format to see it in, and where.
“The Odyssey” is available in a number of film formats, each offering their own unique experience of the film; users of the film-logging social media site Letterboxd can even check off a digital punchcard to track every format in which they’ve seen the film.
For Chicagoans, that means figuring out which theaters are playing “The Odyssey” in which format. And some of the largest, most dynamic formats are hard to track down.
The presentation arguably most befitting Nolan’s gargantuan vision is 70mm IMAX, which makes full use of IMAX’s expanded 1.43:1 aspect ratio and technology, resulting in a larger picture on the screen compared to other formats. Currently, the only theater capable of projecting in that format isn’t even in Chicago, but in southwest suburban Woodridge, home of the Cinemark Seven Bridges and IMAX, 6500 IL-53.
“Only a handful of films are ever shot and presented in this format,” Cinemark public relations officer Julia McCartha told Block Club. “Only 25 theaters in the U.S. and 41 in the world are able to showcase ‘The Odyssey’ in this way, as it requires threading an over-800-pound film reel through specialized projectors by trained projectionists.” The Seven Bridges’ 70mm IMAX projector was installed just this past summer explicitly to screen “The Odyssey.”
And demand has been high: The first two weeks of 70mm IMAX screenings have been completely sold out, and future screenings are sold out as far out as mid-August. Cinemark reported that they have seen people traveling from other cities and even other states just to see the film in this format.
If you’d like to see “The Odyssey” closer to home, but still in a large format, Chicago sports plenty of high-quality presentations of the film. The next best thing to 70mm IMAX is plain old 70mm film, on which the venerated Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave, is projecting “The Odyssey.”
Music Box lead projectionist Julian Antos told Block Club that 70mm film is “seen as the gold standard” of film projection since it was developed in the 1950s. Regular 70mm presentations have a shallower aspect ratio, 2.2:1, compared to IMAX’s 1.43:1. “70mm fills your peripheral vision left to right,” said Antos, “while IMAX fills it in every direction.”
Like Woodridge, the Music Box has also enjoyed sold-out screenings of the film in its initial weeks of release, and Antos said the response has been “incredible,” which he also attributes to the historic nature of the theater itself. “It’s a cool, inviting and warm place to see a movie.”
A number of other large-format presentations of “The Odyssey” can be found all around the city:
70mm: The Music Box isn’t the only place to find 70mm film screenings of “The Odyssey”; the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., and the AMC Roosevelt Collection 16, 1011 S. Delano Ct., are also screening the film in that format.
IMAX with Laser: AMC River East 21 and Regal City North, 2600 N. Western Ave., sport IMAX with Laser presentations, which are digital IMAX screenings that replace the older Xenon lamps with 4K laser light that offers brighter colors and sharper picture than standard digital IMAX.
Premium Large Format (PLF): Most AMC locations around the city, as well as the Alamo Drafthouse Chicago in Wrigleyville, 3519 N. Clark St., use a particular kind of IMAX that uses wide, wall-to-wall flat or scope screens to match typical cinematic ratios (like 2.39:1).
Which format should you see “The Odyssey” in? The answer, really, is whichever one you can get to. Antos assures moviegoers that Nolan kept every possible format in mind when shooting the film, “so it’s not as if seeing it in five-performation 70mm is a compromise.”
Regardless of the format, “The Odyssey”‘s enormous box office, and the demand for large-format presentations of it, is hopefully a signal of increased consumer enthusiasm for going to the movies at a theater, especially for a three-hour epic like this one.
“There is nothing like the immersive, shared, theatrical experience,” McCartha told Block Club. “And audiences are showing they want to come to the theater to experience films in ways that cannot be found anywhere else.”
