The six-minute prologue to The Odyssey is a physical experience, especially when seen from director Christopher Nolan’s preferred spot. That’s the middle row of AMC’s IMAX theater at Universal CityWalk in Hollywood, where Nolan has been reviewing footage in early April as he finishes postproduction. With the 58-by-79-foot screen fully enveloping a viewer’s peripheral vision, waves crash and arrows thud with spine-rattling force.

The Odyssey, which Universal Pictures is releasing in theaters July 17, is the first feature film in which every scene is entirely shot with IMAX cameras—from Matt Damon’s Odysseus huddling inside the iconic Trojan horse to the iron-helmeted Greeks ambushing their foes. Nolan captured many of the moments using a new camera named “the Keighley,” which was designed to handle eye-widening spectacle and intimate dialogue with equal vividness. “We were able to get a lot of extremely intense, emotional scenes with this imaging capability, [which] we’ve never been able to do before,” says Nolan.

The quietest and most versatile camera IMAX has ever created, the Keighley (named after IMAX “chief quality guru” Patricia Keighley and her husband, David, IMAX’s longtime chief quality officer, who died last year) is designed to send Hollywood a message: This format isn’t just for stunts and docs anymore. IMAX is betting that the Keighley will unlock the appeal, and profits, of large-format film for a new generation of directors. It also may sweeten the deal for a potential suitor: IMAX is reportedly exploring a sale.

The ‘Filmed for IMAX’ advantage

2025 was IMAX’s biggest year ever. Box-office revenue has generally lagged since the pandemic, but IMAX screenings generated a record $1.28 billion in ticket sales due to a varied output (Weapons, F1: The Movie, Zootopia 2), international films released locally (China’s Ne Zha 2), and zeitgeist-seizing fare like Sinners, which used IMAX cameras to capture its immersive time-span-crossing musical number. This year may be even bigger, with Project Hail Mary, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, and Dune: Part Three. Tickets for IMAX screenings of Dune: Part Three were being resold on eBay for $4,500 apiece in April—eight months before its December 18 release.

IMAX takes home 11% of the box-office haul from movies released or remastered in the IMAX format. (That amounted to $142 million in 2025, or more than a third of IMAX’s total revenue for that year; the other $268 million came mainly from sales, rentals, and maintenance on IMAX projection systems.) But IMAX sees movies filmed, not just screened, with its technology as an increasingly important part of its business model.

To earn the “Filmed for IMAX” certification—which studios can display in their marketing materials for movies like Supergirl and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu—a film must be shot with IMAX-certified digital cameras (made by third parties like Arri and Sony) or IMAX’s own proprietary 65 mm film cameras. The latter have remained a rarefied tool, with directors from Michael Bay to Jordan Peele jockeying to deploy them for only their most eye-popping scenes.

The Keighley, though, represents a new and far more ambitious voyage for IMAX—one that has evolved from its nearly two-decade-long partnership with Nolan.

How Christopher Nolan learned to fly

Nolan has dreamt of filming an entire Hollywood movie in IMAX since he was 16. At a Six Flags amusement park north of Evanston, Illinois (the suburb where his mother grew up and the London-born Nolan spent his summers), he saw To Fly, an IMAX doc about aviation.

During a particularly spectacular shot filmed from the point of view of a banking airplane, Nolan recalls that his friend “nudged me to look at the audience—and see everyone’s head tilted to one side,” he says, grinning at the memory in his Los Angeles production office.

Since 2008’s The Dark Knight, when he became the first director to use IMAX film cameras in a narrative feature, Nolan has pushed the technology further with every subsequent project—aerial dogfights in Dunkirk, handheld brawls in Tenet, portrait-style close-ups in Oppenheimer. But those scenes always stood apart. IMAX’s cameras—which hadn’t been redesigned in decades—were too cumbersome and loud to handle an entire film, especially the dialogue scenes.

In the spring of 2024, Nolan says, he issued IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond a demand—or maybe a dare: “Look, we want to commit to doing all-IMAX on our next film. If the cameras are ready for that, we can be the first to use them.” IMAX had been working on a new camera for two years already, but Nolan’s bat signal changed the timetable.

“Rich called me and said, ‘We need a plan in place,’” says Mark Welton, president of IMAX Global Theatres. A year later, IMAX had the Keighley in Nolan’s hands.

The biggest ask from Nolan and his Oscar-winning cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, was to make the device quieter. IMAX cameras are loud for a reason. Like any film camera, they expose 24 frames of celluloid every second.

But in IMAX’s 65 mm format, every frame is roughly the size of a credit card—which means that the camera has to whip film across the lens at more than five and a half feet per second while simultaneously stopping it 24 times per second, with perfect precision, so that an image can be photographed. “There’s physics involved that you cannot really avoid,” van Hoytema says.

The Keighley’s carbon-fiber case and redesigned mechanical movement managed to make the camera 15% to 20% quieter than earlier IMAX film cameras—the difference between “an unhinged lawn mower” and “a nicely lubricated sewing machine,” in van Hoytema’s words.

For dialogue scenes requiring total silence on set, Nolan’s crew put its IMAX cameras inside a “blimp”: a 240-pound soundproof box the size of a floor safe. But the Keighley was also quiet enough to allow dialogue recording in locations where the blimp wasn’t practical, like on a boat in heavy seas. “Because people were projecting [their voices] in those scenes, [the camera] didn’t fight it,” Nolan says.

IMAX’s new fleet

Using the Keighley cameras on a film rumored to cost $250 million, the most expensive of Nolan’s career, represented a significant vote of trust. (Nolan deployed them alongside his usual battery of older IMAX cameras.)

A handful of other directors have since put the Keighley to work, including Denis Villeneuve, who used it to film segments of Dune: Part Three. IMAX has made four of the cameras so far, which doesn’t sound like a lot. But given that Nolan had seven IMAX cameras in rotation on The Odyssey—two Keighleys plus five older models—an even slightly larger camera fleet means that for the first time, multiple movies can film in IMAX simultaneously. “It’s a game changer,” says Nolan.

The company believes that the Keighley will appeal to filmmakers who might have been put off by its predecessor, which looks like it was designed for the Apollo missions. “There are literally toggle switches [on it], like NASA mission control,” says Paul Constantinou, IMAX’s VP of hardware and engineering. The Keighley sports a sleek LCD screen and will be able to accommodate modern conveniences like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 4K video tap.

Nolan can’t wait to see what other directors do with the new cameras. “There’s a whole generation of filmmakers younger than me now insisting on film,” he says, “insisting on that analog quality, pushing forward.”