The Odyssey Is Playing on 41 IMAX 70mm Screens. Nine Are in Canada.

There are only 41 IMAX 70mm venues on the current release list for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

Nine of them are in Canada.

Not nine IMAX screens. Nine of the very particular venues that can show this film on 15/70 film. That distinction matters. There may be old or inactive IMAX film projectors elsewhere, but these are the 41 locations that IMAX has listed for The Odyssey right now.

Canada is second only to the United States, which has 25. The United Kingdom has three. Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and France each have one.

So Canada has about 22% of the world’s current Odyssey IMAX 70mm venues. For a country with a very small share of the world’s population, that is a strange and lovely little fact.

The nine are spread out, too. Halifax. Montréal. Mississauga and Vaughan. Regina. Calgary and Edmonton. Langley and Richmond.

There is one useful Toronto footnote. Toronto city proper has no venue on this particular IMAX 70mm list. The two Ontario locations are in Mississauga and Vaughan, both in the GTA. IMAX labels them “Toronto, ON” on its list, which is understandable but not quite the same thing.

This is not entirely an accident. IMAX was invented in Canada. The format grew out of In the Labyrinth, a multi-screen experience at Montreal’s Expo 67. The National Film Board of Canada describes it as leading to the birth of the IMAX format.

Nearly 60 years later, The Odyssey is a very Canadian-looking way to remember that history: an enormous technical experiment, being shown in a handful of theatres around the world, with an oddly large share of them at home.

Why are people making a fuss about 70mm IMAX? It is not simply that the screen is big. The film format uses the taller 1.43:1 IMAX frame. At the same 100-foot screen width, that image is about 70 feet tall. A 1.90:1 digital IMAX image would be roughly 53 feet tall. A CinemaScope image would be about 42 feet tall.

That extra height is why a full-frame IMAX 70mm scene can feel less like a wide rectangle at the front of a theatre and more like a wall. The Odyssey was shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, the first feature film to do that. So the format is not just a fancy way to watch the movie. It is built into the movie itself.

The official IMAX list is the useful place to check before booking. Showtimes change. The 41-location count belongs to this current Odyssey release, not to every IMAX 15/70 projector that has ever existed.

Still, it is a good moment to appreciate the geography of it all. A cinematic format born in Montreal now has nine current places to play a giant Greek epic across Canada.

That is a pretty good Canadian movie fact.