How Rare Is 70mm IMAX? Here's How Many Theaters There Are In The US

Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" is a special one, as it's the first-ever feature film to be shot completely with IMAX cameras. There's just one problem: Barely any theaters are capable of showing the film the way it was meant to be seen. Only a very small and very specific club of venues can actually project it. There's a worldwide pool of just 41 screens, and in the United States, that club has exactly 25 members. Those are scattered across just 14 states, with California hogging eight of them all by itself.

The map is pretty brutal if you look at it. So suppose you're someone living in Portland, Oregon or Salt Lake City — you'd have to face a drive of 400 miles or more to reach an IMAX theater. Still, with over half of the 41 screens situated in the U.S., things obviously get far worse for people living outside the country. The remaining screens are spread across just six countries. Canada accounts for nine of them, the United Kingdom has three, and Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and France each get exactly one.

If you're a cinephile living nowhere near these countries, you could settle for IMAX enhanced media on platforms like Disney+, or the next best option would be digital IMAX, which is quite different from 70mm IMAX – though it still preserves some of that tall aspect ratio IMAX is known for. There are, relatively, a lot more of those around. IMAX counts 1,829 systems across the globe in 89 countries, as of September 30, 2025. But the original 70mm IMAX screens account for roughly 1.4% of that number.

It's clear that 70mm IMAX screens are exceedingly rare, and it's all due to the fact that nobody has built a new IMAX film projector in roughly 50 years. IMAX can't simply restart a production line and it all comes down to missing parts and missing knowledge. Company sources told Variety that plenty of the necessary components flatly no longer exist. Those original design files were drawn up about half a century ago, and nobody maintained them properly in the decades since. So today, the company no longer possesses a complete manufacturing blueprint. They can't just start from scratch either because barely any engineers still in the industry understand how these systems fit together.

What IMAX did instead was go scavenging. Ahead of "The Odyssey", the company spent over a year tracking down broken, abandoned, and largely forgotten projectors sitting in storage, then cannibalized them for parts to rebuild other units. That grind lifted the worldwide total to the aforementioned 41 theaters, up from the 30 that existed when Oppenheimer arrived in 2023.