Cinema grandeur and Italy have a complex relationship. For the majority of the last ten years, the nation that gave the world Fellini, Visconti, and the expansive visual language of neorealism has watched the rest of Europe covertly develop one of the most technically ambitious screening formats ever created, while making very little contribution to the infrastructure itself.
Image Maximum, or IMAX for short, is more than just a larger screen. Instead of the typical five perforations per image, the full 70mm film format uses 15 to move massive frames horizontally thru a projector. Bright, dense, and nearly three-dimensional in its clarity, the result is a level of resolution that digital systems still find difficult to match. Most people agree that watching a movie shot in the format while seated in a well-equipped IMAX theater is a very different experience from going to the movies at a regular theater. Not brighter, not louder. Just bigger, in a meaningful way.
The issue for Italian audiences is that a very particular piece of infrastructure is needed to access this experience. And Italy currently has very little of it.
Italy presently has one IMAX laser theater. It is located at UCI Cinemas Orio, close to Bergamo, and according to visitors, the massive screen and dual-laser system provide precisely the kind of experience the format promises. However, one screen is not a distribution strategy for a nation with 60 million people dispersed over a peninsula. It’s an exception.
When Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey debuted in Italian theaters in July 2026, it was the first movie to be shot entirely on 70mm IMAX film. Every frame and every sequence was recorded on the biggest analog film format available at the time. The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer all had important IMAX sequences, but The Odyssey went farther than any of them. Nolan has long been one of the few directors who insists on filming at least some of his movies in this format. Only seven theaters in Europe were able to show it in its original 70mm print format. Italy is not home to any of those seven.
There were two choices available to Italian viewers of The Odyssey in IMAX. They could see it in digital IMAX, which has two powerful projectors that are superior to those in commercial theaters but lack film. Alternatively, they could view it on a conventional 70mm print, which makes use of film stock but lacks the IMAX system’s particular horizontal frame orientation and perforation count. Both are excellent. They are not the same thing.
It’s difficult not to question what prevents this from changing. Undoubtedly, the equipment is costly, and retrofitting older theaters poses significant structural difficulties. IMAX projectors are large; they need water cooling, weigh nearly two tons, and require a certain room geometry in order to operate. The excitement surrounding the UCI Orio installation shows that there is a market for true IMAX in Italy. The demand appears to be genuine. Apparently, the investment has not materialized.
All of this has a larger irony. Italy developed a cinema culture based on the notion that the image itself has meaning and that the emotional experience of a film is shaped by the viewer’s perception. That instinct seems perfectly in line with the original reasoning behind IMAX, which started out as a reaction to television’s encroachment on the communal, shared, visually overwhelming experience of moviegoing rather than as a commercial format. The two customs appear to be a good fit.
It is genuinely unclear if that partnership will ever result in more screens, more prints, and more Italian viewers seeing movies the way their creators intended. The nation waits for now. Additionally, the one laser screen close to Bergamo is constantly extremely busy.
