Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has generated intense demand for screenings in Imax 70mm, the format in which it was filmed, but only 41 cinemas worldwide can show it in full. The scarcity has left many venues sold out for weeks and highlights longstanding confusion over what audiences receive when cinemas market screenings as “Imax”.

Imax 70mm uses a large 65mm film negative run horizontally to create a sharp, near-square 1.43:1 image on very large screens, unlike many digital Imax sites that use smaller screens and wider cropped images. The Odyssey is also available in five other premium formats and was composed to work across them, as well as future Blu-ray and streaming releases; however, critics argue that Imax branding does not clearly explain these differences.