Sacramento theater is showing ‘The Odyssey’ in its original format. Is it worth it?
Walking on K Street in downtown Sacramento, it’s hard to miss the big red letters of the Esquire IMAX Theater sign. Inside the 86-year-old theater lobby, audiences were lined up to fill their $60 Trojan Horse popcorn buckets before the screening of director Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated rendering of Homer’s epic “The Odyssey.”
The film, which was shot on 70mm IMAX cameras, is expected to earn between $90 and $100 million in its opening weekend. But only 25 theaters in the country and 41 worldwide are equipped to screen the film the way Nolan intended: on a 60 by 80 foot film screen with speakers that make the theater walls shake.
Esquire theater director Doug Link said he could feel the theater parking lot rumbling from the film’s sound design. “You can feel it in your loins,” he said.
“A typical screen would be probably two thirds that for that length right there. We’re adding a whole other third, and that’s a lot of action. That’s a lot of vista,” Link said.
Filmed on special high-resolution IMAX film, Nolan spent approximately $3 million on 2 million feet of raw physical film stock on the nearly three-hour retelling of the ancient Greek poem.
Esquire is one of only a handful of theaters housing the Grand Theatre (GT) projector that can roll through the film. But not only does a theater need the correct projector, it also needs a trained projectionist. Link said there are only 90 projectionists in the world who know how to operate the hulking equipment — at the Esquire, it’s Chris Tyson.
Tyson, who’s originally from Missouri, started working at the Esquire IMAX in 2016. He taught himself how to operate the special projectors when he was younger.
“They gave me a manual and I just tried to figure out what it was saying,” Tyson said.
Handling the film and operating the projector is delicate work. With film so much larger than the standard 35mm frame even microscopic flaws show up large. “If you tear the film, you’ll see it across the big screen,” Tyson said.
All 12 theater rows were filled during Friday’s 11:30 a.m. screening, and all the shows running throughout the weekend are sold out. Watching the film in 70mm is a palpably different experience — Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is a vision in blue as she admonishes her son Telemachus, played by Tom Holland.
Herman Thomas came from Elk Grove to see the film in its original IMAX format, and he wasn’t disappointed.
“You get it of course, the scale of the screen and all, but also a little bit in the sound,” Thomas said.
“I think this movie was probably engineered to be played in this format. I’m sure it’ll be enjoyable in other formats, but this was probably the place to be,” said Alex Raj, another movie-goer.
“Again, it was just the quality of how it was shot. They obviously took a lot of work into making the film, and so I think that all of those elements combined make that this movie a really great experience” Raj said.
Andrea Philips couldn’t tell the difference between a normal film screen and the 70mm. “I mean, it was bigger than anything I’ve seen, but it’s IMAX. I couldn’t tell the difference,” she said.
Tickets for the special IMAX screening at the Esquire are $25. The movie can also be seen in more common digital formats for less. Other Sacramento-area theaters offer IMAX digital screenings, which feature larger screens than traditional theaters, though not as expansive as Esquire’s.
The Esquire has four daily showtimes for the film through Sunday, July 26, and it will then drop to three screenings daily for at least three more weeks, according to IMAX’s website.
