IMAX builds silent film camera for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

IMAX has built a new camera system for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey that turns a famously loud large-format body into something usable for dialogue scenes. The setup, centered on the IMAX Keighley Film Camera and a newly engineered blimp enclosure, is part of a production that IMAX says is the first feature film ever shot entirely on IMAX film cameras.

The practical constraint is brutal. At 24 frames per second, a 1,000-foot magazine lasts only about three minutes, because the camera pushes 70mm film through the gate at about 5.6 feet per second. That means actors are not just performing for the lens, they are working against the clock built into the format. Tom Holland said he briefly thought Christopher Nolan disliked his performance because the director kept calling cut, only to learn the takes were ending because the magazine had only about three minutes of film. Holland said, "I thought I was totally s***ting the bed in this scene."

For Hoyte van Hoytema, the blimp was the breakthrough. IMAX says the cinematographer called it "the most essential piece of equipment on this production," a revealing line for a case where the housing matters as much as the optics. The enclosure is what makes synchronized sound possible at scale, something IMAX cameras have long struggled with because of their noise. That changes blocking and timing in a way still photographers will recognize immediately: the camera is not neutral, and the subject adjusts to its limits whether the subject is an actor on a set or a person holding still in front of a view camera.

IMAX has been leaning into the hardware as much as the movie. The camera used on The Odyssey went on public display in Los Angeles before release, and IMAX is selling a Keighley camera poster that frames the design as a landmark of cinema history. The company says the film opens in IMAX 70mm film on July 17, 2026, with select theaters screening it in that format, and identifies Matt Damon as Odysseus in a story that follows his voyage home after the Trojan War.

For photographers, the story lands because it is not really about a movie star. It is about format discipline. When the camera is this large, this loud, and this demanding, the entire production reorganizes around it, from the way scenes are blocked to the way performers read a cut. That is the same old truth at a grand scale: the camera size and capture format do not just record the subject, they change how the subject behaves.