Christopher Nolan's 'Interstellar' Will Be Projected In 70mm IMAX At About 50 Locations

Somewhere at the cross-section of technological advancement and artistic expression lies Christopher Nolan. The director of The Dark Knight, Memento and Inception is well-known for being beholden to film, and in particular to IMAX film. IMAX continues to produce film cameras for directors like Nolan to use, but IMAX projection is quickly moving away from film. These days, an increasingly large percentage of IMAX theaters have digital projectors, and the company is working towards laser projection.

So where does that leave Nolan's latest film, Interstellar? As in the past, Nolan shot much of Interstellar on IMAX film cameras. He would obviously prefer it be projected that on film, too. In a new interview, the president of IMAX said they'd oblige. Interstellar will be projected on IMAX film at "somewhere around 50" theaters.

Greg Foster, the President of IMAX, revealed this piece of information in an interview with Collider. You can listen and watch the whole thing here.

This sounds like good news, and it is, but 50 is a very small number when you look at the huge number of IMAX theaters in the world. (Between 800-900, according to Wiki.) What the number doesn't tell us is if whether of the digital projection theaters — many of which are IMAX's signature theaters — will be projecting on film. I've heard rumors that some of the bigger theaters with digital projection may import film projectors specifically for Interstellar, but that's unconfirmed as of now.

My feeling is, while I'd ideally like to see Interstellar projected on IMAX film, as long as the theater has an actual size IMAX screen where the ratio changes from 2:35 to 1:43, it should be fine. Christopher Nolan might disagree, but, 50 out of 850 is not a great percentage.

Are you going to seek out an IMAX theater projecting film for Interstellar? It opens November 7.