I Projected The Odyssey In 70mm. Here's Why It Proves Movies Are Back

I am a veteran of the opening weekend of The Odyssey.

On July 17, 2026, I stepped into the projection booth of the historic Plaza Theater (the oldest in Atlanta, having opened in 1939), situated behind the screening room where 324 people sat in fervent anticipation to see Christopher Nolan’s next film post-Oppenheimer, an adaptation of a 3,000-year-old Greek epic. The moment the final trailer ended and the lights dimmed, the noisy chatter that typically comes with a sold-out screening died off…only to be replaced by the thunderous sound of a wooden stick banging against a hard floor, and the voice of Travis Scott’s unnamed Greek rhapsode crying out the tale of Odysseus. “A face. A fleet. A war.”

First glimpsed during that opening monologue, one of the most important images of the film is that of the Trojan Horse, half-submerged in sand and drenched in seawater, containing dozens of silent, single-minded Greek soldiers. It was a perfect reflection of the theater itself — an enclosed space holding hundreds of people, all locked into a singular communal experience. And as the 70mm projectionist for the night (a job far more involved than the button-pressing necessary for a digital show), for almost 3 hours I filled a role not all that dissimilar to Odysseus himself: the captain of a journey, entrusted by all those viewers to guide them through something immense and exhilarating.

The Plaza Theater and other repertory cinemas like it might not have the giant floor-to-ceiling screen necessary to play The Odyssey in the intended 1.43.1 IMAX 70mm aspect ratio, but it has something that many theaters around the world no longer have: a setup for physical film projection. The Plaza owns two Century JJ dual gauge projectors (which means they can switch between 35 and 70mm) and operates using changeovers as opposed to the platter system.

This essentially means that, instead of splicing the entire film print together to make one big reel, the movie is separated into five reels (4 of which weigh upwards of 50 lbs and hold 35-40 minutes of footage) that are then played in an alternating pattern between projectors — the first reel starts on projector one, and when there are only 30 seconds left on the reel, a changeover cue (a white circle or the cigarette burns Brad Pitt mentions in Fight Club) indicates that you have six seconds to “changeover” to the next reel on projector two, and that process is repeated back and forth until the entire film has played.

Although The Odyssey was shot on IMAX 70mm, which has 15 perforations per frame and runs through a projector horizontally, it was meticulously cropped and re-sized to fit on a standard 70mm film print, which runs 5 perforations per frame and runs through the projector vertically to achieve a 2.20.1 widescreen aspect ratio. Running 70mm film always requires certain stipulations, but like every Nolan film, this one came with requirements straight from Universal and the filmmaker himself. Alongside incredibly specific instructions regarding framing and handling, we were only allowed to test the print (common practice before opening night to catch any preexisting blemishes) long after the theater had closed, with no one, not even staff, allowed inside the screening room – there’s a sacred ritualism to it all, almost like making the correct offering to the gods.

The act of projecting for a crowd is just as sacrosanct and ceremonial. Carefully threading the film through the machine, adjusting frame or focus when necessary, making sure changeovers happen imperceptibly, watching vigilantly on the off chance human or mechanical error affects the on-screen image; a projectionist is ultimately responsible, in a very hands-on way, for how the film is delivered to viewers. Looked at from a certain perspective, the process echoes the classic storytelling tradition that preserved Homer’s saga in the first place — a story is passed on to you by the filmmaker in the form of a print, and in turn you present that story to an audience, with the knowledge that at some point in the future, another storyteller at another theater will use that same print to share the same story with a new audience.

“The act of projecting for a crowd is just as sacrosanct and ceremonial.”

For some, this might sound like a whole lot of effort just to play a movie, but the end result is nothing short of the kind of magic mentioned in The Odyssey’s opening titles. Because the standard 70mm print was created straight from the original IMAX 70mm negative, you lose considerably less visual information than in the conversion to digital – a standard 70mm frame is 3.5 times larger than a 35mm or digital frame, which means that when it’s blown up on the big screen, it retains far more clarity, detail, and control over fine colors than a regular digital screening would allow for. Seeing The Odyssey on 70mm means seeing the texture of the film’s Grecian armor or the colors of the vast sea and sky far closer to reality than digital could ever allow for, which makes sense considering that 70mm resolution has been approximated somewhere between 8K and 12K.

Reading it feels a lot like technical jargon, but to see it is to believe. I’ve played The Odyssey on film five separate times now, and there’s an electricity as the crowd leaves the theater that’s largely due to the excitement around the format. People call in every day to make sure that what they’re seeing is truly on film (occasionally asking for a crash course on the difference), and countless patrons will hang out in the lobby after a show, craning their necks hoping to get a glimpse of the massive reels which hold the film, or a peek at the booth where light and momentum convert still images into an epic-in-motion.

“It’s incredibly fitting to be projecting The Odyssey, a movie about an arduous journey back home, on traditional film.”

While Nolan has long been an advocate for shooting on film, The Odyssey is a part of a recent wave in Hollywood of directors pushing the biggest movies of the year on analog large-formats like both versions of 70mm or VistaVision. Oppenheimer in 2023, The Brutalist in 2024, One Battle After Another and Sinners last year – so many directors of the moment are choosing to present the magnitude of their films in a format that not only befits massive scale, but also encourages repeat viewings and a collective enthusiasm about the different ways the medium can be presented. There’s a special irony to Nolan pushing the envelope by making The Odyssey the first film in history to shoot entirely in IMAX 70mm: 70mm was the format used for classic historical epics like Ben-Hur and Cleopatra, and that lineage is obvious in Nolan’s latest outing.

It’s incredibly fitting to be projecting The Odyssey, a movie about an arduous journey back home, on traditional film. The Plaza Theater, like many theaters across America, tore out its original film projectors back in 2013 to make room for the transition to digital, and it wasn’t until the release of Tenet in 2020 that the Plaza installed its current 35/70mm projectors – 7 years of digital intangibility, much like the 7 years Odysseus spends on Calypso’s island before finally returning to Ithaca. Analog film projectors will probably never make a widespread return in our current age of multiplexes.

But humble theaters like the Plaza and dedicated projectionists persist in keeping the format alive – and, in its own special way, tactile film projection has been invaluable the last few years in maintaining the prestige that surrounds big-budget epics like this one.

The Odyssey is now playing in theaters.