Grand Rapids — They’ve come from far and wide, setting their sights on Celebration! Cinemas GR North, the destination of their cinematic odyssey.
Just as Odysseus makes an epic quest in “The Odyssey,” so, too, do film fans. They’re making day trips, weekends and vacations out of it, coming from as far as Hawaii from the west and Denmark from the east, journeying to see the blockbuster epic on the one screen in Michigan showing it in its optimal IMAX 70MM format.
There are all sorts of technical specifics to explain it, but in layman’s terms, the specialized presentation offers the highest image resolution possible on the largest and tallest screen available.
It’s director Christopher Nolan’s preferred format of choice, and it’s only showing this way in 25 theaters across the U.S. and in 41 theaters in the world, the Celebration! Cinemas location in Grand Rapids being one of them. (The next closest IMAX 70MM theaters to Detroit are in Toronto and Indianapolis.)
“This has been really fun,” says Emily Loeks, the Celebration! chain’s director of public relations and community affairs. “We get the opportunity to have a theater that has been a regional draw and has had guests from all over the country, and we think this presentation is just magnificent.”
Outside the theater’s IMAX projection booth, which visitors can peer inside through a series of windows as they exit or enter the theater, a map of the U.S. reads “Every pin, an Odyssey,” and invites filmgoers to mark where they’re coming to the theater from.
There’s at least one pin in every state, and two in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota and Maine. There are three in South Carolina and Arkansas, six in Kansas and on up, including at least 20 in Texas and about 30 in Florida. Viewers have also come from Canada, Mexico, South America and beyond.
So far the theater has sold roughly 50,000 tickets to its premium “Odyssey” showings, says Loeks. Showtimes have been sold out for weeks, even early morning screenings starting at the early bird hour of 7:45 a.m. and nighttime showings which don’t get out until 1 a.m.
And it continues to be sold out for weeks to come, though last week the theater added four additional weeks of screenings, which will carry showtimes through Sept. 16.
An intricate process
The theater, which was opened in 2001, has experience showing Nolan films in IMAX 70MM, having shown the director’s “Oppenheimer” that way in 2023. This is bigger, and after three weekends, “The Odyssey” already ranks as the third-highest-grossing IMAX release ever.
“For me, I just don’t think there’s a better way to see it,” says Sam Borri, 27, of Orlando, Florida, who was seeing the movie at 11:30 a.m. Monday with his father, 58-year-old Jim Borri of Holland.
The younger Borri studied film at Full Sail University in Florida and is a former employee at the Celebration! Cinemas location, who used to work the IMAX booth himself. “It’s intense, you’ve gotta make sure you get it right,” he says.
Inside the booth, plenty can go wrong. A team of projectionists spool a gargantuan film reel — laid flat, it stretches 11 miles, or approximately the distance from downtown Detroit to Royal Oak — through an insanely intricate process which, when a movie is running, makes enough noise to wake the giants Odysseus and his men battle in the movie.
The celluloid reel spins on a massive platter and is threaded through a complex roller matrix into the projector, which rolls through about 337 feet of film per minute.
A sort of seat belt is placed around the film while it’s on its platter to keep it from spilling onto the floor. A field flattener is cleaned off with Rain-X in between showings, to remove any dust buildup that may accumulate on the projector’s lens.
There’s a red button labeled “E-Stop” on the side of the projector, which is to be pushed in case anything goes wrong during a screening and the projectors need to be immediately powered down. “We call that the ‘Oh S–t’ button,” says Jesse Forquer, the vice president of technology at Studio C, Celebration! Cinema’s parent company.
The Grand Rapids theater has shown the movie about 100 times and there’s only been one issue with the presentation so far. “We had to stop it for about four minutes during our 70th show,” Forquer says. The issue was resolved and the movie was back up and running.
Prior to “The Odyssey’s” July arrival, the theater’s projectionists trained by practicing with Nolan’s 2014 film “Interstellar.”
“We have a six minute loop of ‘Interstellar,’ because we don’t want to run a three hour movie every time we thread it,” Forquer says. “We want to be able to thread a projector over and over and over again, and we’ve probably threaded that 1,000 times.”
The theater’s two IMAX projectors have been dubbed TARS and CASE, after the robots from “Interstellar.”
Between the two, “TARS is the one we run off most of the time,” Forquer says. “TARS is the one that survives all the time. That’s our old reliable projector right there.”
Big screen, big business
The “Odyssey” print was shipped to the theater in three huge metal shipping cases labeled “CT,” or “Charlie’s Tale.” It was an extra security measure meant to throw off would-be thieves, although regardless of what it’s labeled, it’s not easy to make off with 600 pounds of film.
The film came on 54 individual reels, each one about three to four minutes in length. Put together, they add up to a two-hour, 52-minute runtime of “The Odyssey,” which stars Matt Damon in the lead role and a supporting cast that includes practically half of Hollywood.
Since opening on July 17, “The Odyssey” has grossed more than $400 million domestically, and along with “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” it helped lead last weekend to the largest collective box office weekend in history.
The film has grossed $221 million globally from IMAX showings, and helped lead IMAX to its highest-grossing month in its more than 50-year history, shattering its previous monthly record by 47%, the company announced Monday. “The Odyssey” is the fastest film in IMAX history to surpass $200 million in global IMAX box office.
In IMAX 70MM, the film has grossed $27.6 million globally, or 12% of the film’s total IMAX box office. Over the weekend, theaters showing the film in IMAX 70MM averaged $673,000 per location, according to IMAX.
The amount Celebration! has invested in its “Odyssey” presentation “is significant,” says Loeks. An individual print of the movie costs $200,000.
Tickets to IMAX 70MM showings are $25 each, no matter if it’s a 7:45 a.m. screening on a Wednesday or a prime time ticket at 7 p.m. Saturday night. The theater has 270 seats, and those newly added showtimes into September are starting to fill up.
A tough ticket
Since tickets are limited and in high demand, film fans have been buying whatever showtimes they can get their hands on.
“We were scouring websites. We looked at three different theaters, and we looked at every single showtime on every single day that they had, until we found this one,” says Angela Soto, 21, of Goshen, Indiana. She came to a 7:45 a.m. screening on Monday with her friend Etherea Renzi, and they made the two-hour trip north together.
When she finally scored tickets, “we literally said the gods were looking out for us,” Soto says. She said the experience exceeded her expectations. “I don’t care if I get sleep deprived, it was worth the trip.” (They were planning to make a stop at Starbucks before heading home.)
Nic Truehl, 31, of Mosinee, Wisconsin, planned a weekend trip to Cedar Point, with a stopover at an 11:30 a.m. showing of “The Odyssey” on his way home, “for the love of cinema,” he says.
Truehl built a home theater in his house, but he says nothing can match the experience of a true IMAX 70MM presentation.
“As technology has marched on, it’s easier than ever to get a ‘cinema-like’ experience at home, so for many it is hard to justify the expense of taking the family to a movie vs. just watching it at home,” he says. “That’s why these unique formats are so important: they even get someone like me, who has built a dedicated home theater, to come out to the movies.”
The Pascarella family of Grosse Ile — mom Kristi, dad Salvatore and daughter Mia — heard about the IMAX 70MM presentation last month. “We were like, ‘let’s go, and make a weekend of it!'” says Kristi.
They spent two nights in Grand Rapids, visited Grand Haven on Sunday, and went to see “The Odyssey” at 11:30 a.m. on Monday. “It was totally worth it,” says Mia, 20. Adds her mother, “My heart’s still pounding. I was shaking from the music and the sound.”
Loeks has been thrilled with the turnout thus far. She was born into the movie biz; her grandfather, Jack Loeks, opened one of the country’s first multiplexes, Studio 28 in Grand Rapids, and her uncle Jim founded Star Theatres, the Metro Detroit theater chain which which was prolific in the 1980s and ’90s.
When the theater put its first batch of tickets for its “Odyssey” IMAX 70MM presentations on sale a year ago, those were gone “within moments,” Loeks says. Tickets for additional showtimes went on sale in June, and 4,000 tickets were sold within the first two hours they were available, she says.
Loeks says it’s exciting coming to work in the morning and hearing film fans “all abuzz,” discussing nerdy topics like aspect ratios and screen luminosity among one another. At a time when streaming has put the squeeze on the theatrical experience, the resounding success of the “Odyssey” showings is proving the continued validity and relevance of movie theaters.
“I sense people feel like they’re experiencing something special,” says Loeks. “It’s been delightful.”
For Jeff Alhusein, the decision to make the journey to see “The Odyssey” in the premium format was simple.
“Anytime you get a chance to see a Christopher Nolan movie in the way it’s intended to be seen, you have to do it,” says the 22-year-old from West Bloomfield. He had already seen the movie in IMAX in Ann Arbor, but along with his friend Gabe Alkassis, he drove to Grand Rapids on Monday to see it how his favorite Oscar-winning filmmaker wanted it to be seen.
“The picture quality is unlike anything else. It’s stunning,” Alhusein says. “Anytime I get the chance to see any of his films in 70MM, I’ll be back here.”
Looks like for film fans, there are still more odysseys to come.
agraham@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Fans flock from far and wide to Michigan’s only IMAX 70MM ‘Odyssey’
Reporting by Adam Graham, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Adam Graham, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
