Enormous respect to Christopher Nolan’s commitment to film. The Odyssey was shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, exposing about 2.1 million feet of 65mm negative. That is not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It is a filmmaker with the influence, resources, and sheer stubbornness to make an epic using the medium he genuinely loves. As someone who also loves film, I have to respect the hell out of that.
The raw stock cost approximately $3.15 million. That sounds enormous until you compare it with the film’s reported $250 million production budget. The physical film itself accounted for only about 1.26 percent. The rest went toward the actors, craftspeople, engineers, locations, sets, ships, laboratories, and thousands of artistic and technical decisions required to create the finished work. This is true cinematic artistry in its 2026 form: old and new technology, backed by hundreds of artists, all serving one enormous vision.
Some interesting reading for fellow film obsessives: Variety on the two million feet of film, Variety on the IMAX cameras and $50,000 prints, The Verge on the new IMAX camera technology, and Reuters on the film’s reported $250 million budget.