The Odyssey Is a Film Where Poor People Literally See Less.

The Odyssey has been everywhere over the past few weeks. On every feed, in every group conversation, and somewhere in the middle of all that noise, I found myself thinking about something I'd genuinely never considered before about cinema. Not about the story, but about its format.

Nolan shot the whole thing on IMAX 70mm, a first for a feature film. That's obviously historic and impressive, except the way he intended you to see it exists in only 41 theatres on the entire planet. Twenty-five of those are in the US, most of them clustered in places like California, while the rest are scattered across a handful of countries that happen to have the infrastructure and money to run them. The rest of the world, meaning most of the world, watches a cropped version in a standard cinema and misses something like 40% of the actual image, top and bottom, that the format was built to show.

I watched it in Lebanon, in a normal cinema, because there is no IMAX 70mm anywhere near me, and I loved it despite the limitations. I haven't stopped thinking about it since. So this isn't me saying the film doesn't work without the format, because it clearly does. But I can't get over the fact that somewhere in London or Los Angeles, someone was watching a version of this film that is, objectively, more complete than the one most of us saw. Quite literally, more image on the screen.

And that's where it gets controversial. Cinema has always sold itself as the democratic art form, accessible to everyone because it doesn't require vast wealth or a degree to sit in a dark room and watch a film. That's the whole appeal of cinema. But with The Odyssey, you do need to live near one of those 41 buildings, or have the money and passport to fly to one, if you want to experience the full film Nolan actually made. People are booking flights around screening times. That is not a normal thing to have to do to watch a film, and it challenges the very idea of cinema being within everyone's reach.

The easy conclusion is that it's elitist. That Nolan is making films for a small circle of well-connected, well-resourced cities while leaving everyone else with the leftovers. I don't think that's quite right, or at least it's not the whole story. Nolan and directors like him shoot on IMAX because it is genuinely the highest-resolution, highest-fidelity format we have. It gives them more information to work with and greater control over what they're putting on screen. That's an artistic decision, not a snobbish one. The exclusivity isn't the point; it's a side effect of projectors that cost a fortune to install and maintain, and screens most cinemas were never built to accommodate. Nobody is gatekeeping on purpose. The infrastructure simply isn't there yet, much like how most of the world wasn't equipped with 3D projectors before James Cameron's Avatar prompted cinemas to retrofit almost overnight. Maybe in ten years, IMAX 70mm will be as unremarkable as 3D eventually became, and Nolan will be remembered as the filmmaker who pushed the format beyond a handful of flagship cities.

Maybe. Hopefully. But right now, in the summer of 2026, one fact remains. Countries without a flagship IMAX 70mm cinema simply get less film. Less image. Less of what the director actually shot. Whatever intention sits behind it, whether technical, artistic, or historical, the outcome is the same. And I think that's worth sitting with rather than rushing to either, "It's fine, there's no real difference" (because clearly there is) or, "Nolan is an elitist." Neither position tells the whole story. The truth is messier, and perhaps more uncomfortable. An art form built on accessibility now has a version of itself that fully belongs only to the places that can already afford everything else.

The Odyssey is a film where poorer audiences, quite literally, see less. That much is undeniable. What's harder to sit with is how much of that was ever intentional, and how much of it is simply the quiet default of an industry that is still evolving.