Vincent Simmons, a Los Angeles native, is about to embark on an international journey for the first time in his life. In just a few days, he will be boarding a 15-hour flight bound for Melbourne, not to soak in the coastal beauty, dive into coffee culture, or explore vibrant art scenes, but for an entirely different attraction: the cinema.
Having spread the expense over several credit cards, the 35-year-old projectionist has spent nearly $4,000 on flights and accommodation for a three-week adventure. His mission? To witness ‘The Odyssey,’ the latest masterpiece from the esteemed Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan, which hits Australian theaters on July 16, at the iconic IMAX in Melbourne.
Simmons plans to watch the film twice in Melbourne, adding to a screening he has lined up in Los Angeles just before his departure.
“I’ve heard tales of Melbourne’s IMAX for years,” Simmons shares with SBS News, “and probably seen every YouTube video that even slightly features it. I always promised myself I’d make the trip one day.”
According to Simmons, “70mm IMAX provides an unparalleled sensory experience when it comes to watching films.”
“It’s the closest sense of lifelike fidelity — a transcendent film format that everyone should experience at least once in their life. But to be fair, if they experience it once, they will want to experience it again.”
He calls the trip his own odyssey.
“I was brave enough to undertake my own odyssey in travelling to Melbourne,” he says.
“Hopefully it won’t be as burdensome as Odysseus’ journey!”
Not any old cinema
Melbourne’s IMAX isn’t just any old cinema.
It’s one of only 41 in the world equipped to project true IMAX 70mm film, the largest film stock in existence — so large that the camera has to be reloaded every three minutes during a shoot.
At 32 metres wide and 23 metres tall, and with an aspect ratio of 1.43:1, the Melbourne IMAX’s screen is also the biggest of its kind anywhere.
“Because we’re only one of 41 cinemas in the entire world that can screen this film on IMAX 70mm on our large 1.43:1 aspect ratio screen, it’s a place that customers seek out,” Jeremy Fee, general manager at IMAX Melbourne, tells SBS News.
“This is the only place in Australia, in the southern hemisphere, that you can see it in the way that Christopher Nolan intended.”
Just seven of those theatres are outside of North America.
The film print itself is a “massive beast”, Fee says.
Laid out end to end, a single print of The Odyssey stretches more than 17km.
Its reels run on platters so large they can hold three hours of runtime — just eight minutes more than The Odyssey’s own two hours and 52 minutes.
Each session requires constant quality assurance checks to keep the film running true — and just five people in Australia are currently qualified to do it.
“It’s a perishable skill,” he says. “It was [a dying craft] … I think it’s a growing art form now.”
While a renewed appreciation for the craft may have averted — or at least delayed — its demise, the current scarcity of those accredited to carry it out is exactly what’s pulling people across oceans to watch a movie in Melbourne.
An odyssey in itself
At Melbourne’s IMAX opening weekend for The Odyssey, it’s a similar story up and down the queue: people have travelled a long way to be here.
Kaivalya, a 28-year-old PhD student and Nolan-fanatic, is in the middle of relocating to Melbourne from Maharashtra, India — but pushed his flights forward by a month so he could catch The Odyssey early.
It’s not the first time cinema has dictated his travel plans; in 2014, he travelled 400km from his hometown in India to see Nolan’s Interstellar on the nearest IMAX screen he could find.
Now, Melbourne’s IMAX is about to become his local.
“I intend to watch many movies in this theatre in the coming months,” he says. “It will be my go-to destination for movies for the next year.”
His eyes light up when he talks about why film wins out over digital.
“This is a much more immersive experience because the resolution is much higher,” he says. “The colours feel warmer. I love watching the grain in the movie — it gives it life.”
His friends back home are also chasing a similar experience.
“My friends in India are travelling internationally — some to China, some to the US. The nearest IMAX 70mm theatre to India is in Thailand, so many people are travelling there and applying for visas,” he says.
“It’s like a concert.”
Mitchell and Dimeth, both 22, didn’t travel as far — a weekend trip down from Brisbane — but they’ve built an entire ritual around seeing Nolan’s films at the Melbourne cinema.
“We came last time to see Oppenheimer,” Mitchell tells SBS News. “It’s kind of our thing — for Nolan, we’ll come and watch it here.”
He was online the moment general tickets dropped last month: “I waited an hour to make sure we got good tickets,” he says.
Their closest IMAX, on the Gold Coast, is digital and smaller.
Dimeth says their closest IMAX on the Gold Coast, which is smaller and runs digitally, doesn’t compare to the scale and theatre of Melbourne.
“This level of immersion isn’t something you get in many other cinemas,” he says.
Mitchell reckons the hype has only made the tickets more valuable.
“I think people are jealous that we get to see it,” he says. “Someone I work with was trying to buy a ticket off me.”
A tourist attraction
Just seven weeks of sessions have been released so far, with months of screenings still to come. But records are expected to be broken.
“We’re up to 52,500 people who have bought tickets to The Odyssey so far in this cinema,” Fee says, adding that each session can only seat 450 people.
Box office for Odyssey at the Melbourne IMAX is already well past $2 million, rapidly closing in on the cinema’s all-time record of $2.78 million set by another Nolan film, Oppenheimer. It’s currently the 7th highest-grossing film of all time in the theatre — with no signs of slowing down.
“We’re so close to already knocking that one over,” Fee says.
“We’ve got people coming from Germany, Turkey, New Zealand, India, Sri Lanka … I’ve never seen the amount of hype for a release as I have for this one.”
But there are still challenges — and cinemas like Melbourne’s can’t simply be replicated elsewhere.
The film projection system was pulled from the cinema in 2015 and sat dormant for two years before being reinstalled in 2017 at Nolan’s request for his film Dunkirk.
“You have to invest a lot of money,” Fee says.
“For Oppenheimer, there were 30 film projector sites for IMAX. They managed to find another 11 projectors for The Odyssey to get it up to 41. I don’t know if there’s any more out there, and they’re not building any more.”
“So it’s a really lucky and fortuitous thing that we still have our film projection system — and that those 40 other theatres across the globe have held onto theirs as well.”
Fee expects the same scenes to play out again in December, when Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three — also shot substantially on IMAX 70mm — opens on 17 December.
For now, though, Melbourne has an unlikely tourist attraction on its hands.
“It’s a tourism boom for Melbourne, for us to be able to have this here,” he says. “The fact that people are building their holidays and their trips around coming to Melbourne is super exciting.”
“It’s changed cinema into this event.”