Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ and the problem with “intended experience”
- Chris Godfrey
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Christopher Nolan shot The Odyssey entirely on IMAX film, yet only 41 of the world's roughly 1,759 IMAX theatres can show it in the full 1.43:1 format he intended and only three of those screens are in the UK. That's not a one-off. Film, streaming, gaming, and audio have all put prestige before reach. Why does this situation keep happening, and what does it cost brands who try it?
Am I missing something here?
Why would anyone build something for a global audience and then make it almost impossible for the vast majority of folks to see or experience it as intended?
That’s what Christopher Nolan has just done, and it makes no sense to me.
‘The Odyssey’ is shot entirely on IMAX cameras, and in its purest form, the 1.43:1 aspect ratio on 70mm film fills more of the screen and puts viewers closer to the action than any other format used in commercial cinema.
Which is good.
Except that big version of the movie can only show on 41 screens worldwide, and only three of them are in the UK. Everybody else, which is to say almost everyone Nolan presumably wants to see his epic, will have to watch a version he finds inferior.
This seems like an odd choice for a director whose reputation rests partly on scale and spectacle, and on being seen by as many people as possible on the biggest screen available. It also raises a question that reaches well past cinema: why do capable, ambitious people keep building the “real” version of something in a format that hardly anyone can reach?
You could call it prestige exclusivity, but I think that label makes it sound too tidy. In my view, what's actually happening is much simpler: someone decides that protecting their vision matters more than making it accessible, then they convince themselves that the two things are incompatible.
Of course, Nolan isn't the only one doing this, and the film biz isn't the only place where it happens. Other industries have also gone with some version of the same bet.
Most of them lose out.
Film: Chris Nolan - 'The Odyssey' and 'Tenet'
The IMAX gamble on ‘The Odyssey’ isn't a one-off for Nolan. He made a similar call with ‘Tenet’ in 2020 - mixing the dialogue so heavily under sound effects and score that audiences in ordinary cinemas were struggling to hear what the characters said. Movie houses were reduced to hanging notices that told customers that their speakers weren't broken; what they were getting was simply how the film sounded.
When asked about this issue, Nolan made no apologies for his work.
“We're mixing for well-aligned, great theatres... mixing for everyone is just chasing the tail. It doesn't work.”
Translated: this film is built for the best possible venue, and screw the rest of you - which is a very ‘honest’ position to take in public. It's also a decision to put a small, well-equipped slice of the audience ahead of everyone else and write off a big piece of box office at the same time.
Streaming: Quibi
Quibi raised roughly $1.75 billion on the theory that people wanted premium short-form video, as long as it stayed on their phones and arrived in ten-minute vertical bursts. The app made it hard to clip or share anything, so it never got the organic spread that TikTok and YouTube rely on. It also misread something basic about how people actually watch content: they might start a show on the train, but they want to finish it on a sofa, in front of a television, not squinting at a five-inch screen. The company folded within six months of launch.
Gaming: Google Stadia
Google's cloud gaming platform needed a stable connection of roughly 10 to 35 Mbps just to run properly, a bar that a large share of households, especially outside major cities, couldn't reach in 2019. Then the company layered on a pricing model that charged full price per game as well as a subscription. Finally, they offered a library that gave nobody a strong reason to fight through the technical barriers. No wonder Google shut the venture down after three years.
Audio: Joe Rogan and Spotify
This example is shaped a little differently, but it's worth including because the same instinct shows up working in reverse. In 2020, Spotify paid Joe Rogan a reported $200 million to make his podcast exclusive to its app. That decision didn't so much alienate his audience as cap it: anyone unwilling to install Spotify simply lost access, which meant Spotify was capping its own advertising revenue from the show.
By 2024, the company had renegotiated the deal to drop exclusivity altogether. Amazing. Even the business doing the gatekeeping eventually worked out it was just gatekeeping itself.
Smaller examples, same instinct
An identical pattern turns up in less dramatic places. Restaurants that switched to QR-code-only menus during the pandemic kept the format long after it stopped being a public health measure, even though it shut out droves of older customers and those without a smartphone.
In music, Kings of Leon's 2021 album was available everywhere as normal, through Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music and Amazon. But the extra perks, including front-row concert seats for life, were locked behind an NFT purchase that required a MetaMask crypto wallet and an OpenSea account - a setup process most fans had never attempted and had no appetite to try.
What connects all of it
The point here is about who gets consulted before a format decision gets set. In all the examples above, the person making the call chose the option closest to their own idea of quality, prestige, or control, and treated audience reach as something else.
That's not automatically the wrong decision: a genuinely superior format can justify some friction, provided the audience that matters most can still get access. But there's a real difference between friction that protects quality and friction that only protects somebody's idea of quality - one nobody outside the room ever agreed to.
Most of my examples land on the wrong side of that line, which is why they ended in a shutdown, a rewritten contract, or a cinema chain posting an apology note.
A checklist before you make a format decision
For anyone running content or making media decisions, and particularly in B2B, where the instinct to gate things behind forms, apps, or “premium” formats runs deep, it's worth putting any format or distribution call through a short set of honest questions before it goes live:
Can the people you most need to reach access this content without buying new hardware, downloading a new app, or making a special trip?
Are you choosing this format because it serves the audience, or because it signals ambition to people inside your own building?
Strip the format away entirely: would the content still hold up? Or is the format doing work the content should be doing itself?
What share of your actual target audience, not your most engaged five percent, can realistically get to this on the first try?
If a competitor delivered the same idea in the most accessible format available, would that beat your version on impact, even if it looked less polished doing it?
Who signed off on the accessibility trade-off, and were they representing the audience, or the people in the room?
Note that none of this is an argument for playing it safe. Ambitious formats can often be the right way to go. However, you need to make that call with your eyes open, rather than assuming that difficult access automatically means higher quality.
Final word
‘The Odyssey’ will do just fine at the box office regardless of how many people see it in 1.43:1. But the lesson sitting beneath travels well past Hollywood: the format you choose isn't neutral packaging wrapped around your idea. It's part of the message, and for most of your audience, it might be the only part of your work they ever get to judge.
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