Shot entirely on IMAX film

This is the heavyweight version of the format, and it means exactly what it says: the movie was captured on large-format film — a 70mm strip run horizontally so that each frame spans fifteen perforations, the biggest image commercial cinema has ever recorded. A single frame holds so much detail that even the finest digital sensors are still chasing it, which is why these films look almost impossibly sharp and deep when projected at true scale.

That resolution comes at a genuine cost. The cameras are enormous, heavy, and famously loud; the film magazines hold only a few minutes before a reload; the stock and processing are extraordinarily expensive; and the frame is so tall that composing for it is its own discipline. For decades this made shooting entirely on large-format film effectively impossible for a narrative feature. Directors who loved the look used it in bursts — a set piece here, an opening there — and cut back to smaller formats for the dialogue and the coverage, because you simply could not carry the big cameras through an entire production.

That is the barrier Christopher Nolan set out to break on The Odyssey — the first feature photographed entirely on IMAX film cameras, start to finish, with no smaller-format footage to fall back on. To make it possible, the cameras themselves had to change: new and heavily modified large-format bodies were developed to be quieter and more mobile than any that came before — able to run in intimate, dialogue-driven scenes and even to be operated handheld, something the format's giant, roaring cameras were never built to do. It turned a tool that could only manage spectacle in short bursts into one that could carry a whole story.

The result is a film in which every frame — the vast and the quiet alike — is recorded on the largest format there is. That is the landmark: not that large-format film was used, which many films have done, but that an entire feature was built on it, with the equipment reinvented to allow it. Clicking the badge is the whole point — it marks a movie shot at a scale and on a medium that, until now, no complete feature had ever attempted.