GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A West Michigan Celebration Cinema is one of only 30 theaters in the world showing Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" in a rare 70mm IMAX format — and the theater is giving audiences a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to make that experience possible.
The 600-pound film reel requires extenders just to feed into the projector, and threading it correctly is a process.
"I'm going to start to thread this through our roller matrix," Studio C Vice President of Technology Jesse Forquer said.
When asked if she was nervous, Forquer didn't hesitate.
"No, I've done this before. A little bit… It's because a lot can go wrong when you're doing this," Forquer said.
The film stretches approximately 11 miles and must pass through numerous sprockets in a precise way for the movie to play correctly.
"There's a lot of intricacies as you go through it and thread this projector. You have to be right on. So if you're so much as one sprocket off when you thread this projector, it will throw off the timing and it'll ruin things really quickly," Forquer said.
The film is shot entirely in IMAX 15/70 format, a format Forquer says delivers a superior experience compared to standard digital projection.
"This is one of the best cinematic experiences that you can have as a moviegoer. The resolution is six or seven times what you would normally see in a digital auditorium, and the frame size, if you compared it to a 35-millimeter frame, is about 10 times the surface area. So you get roughly 12k resolution as opposed to like 2k on a normal digital projector," Forquer said.
As of Monday, the theater had already sold 10,000 tickets.
"We opened up four show times for sale a year ago. They were gone in a heartbeat," Studio C Director of Community Affairs Emily Loeks said.
Loeks said the theater's ability to present the film at all puts it in rare company — and the window to see it is limited.
"We're one of the handful of theaters in the country that even has the capacity to present it. And once we're finished, it will go to the archives. So it's a limited window, and it's really exciting," Loeks said.
After the film ends, moviegoers can see the physical film reel in person. Audiences can exit through the auditorium's exit door and walk past the studio to view the reel at the top of the auditorium.
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