7 Movies You Probably Didn't Know Were Shot In IMAX
With IMAX screens booked out for months in advance as fans desperately try to see Cristopher Nolan's The Odyssey in the best possible setting, we can say with confidence that the large format theatrical experience is currently having a moment.
Now, with the news that Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther 3 is set to be the first MCU movie shot on large format film, it's becoming clear that this is much more than a passing fad. None of which should be surprising if you consider that by the end of December, 2026 will have seen the release of a total of 12 movies that were at least partially shot on IMAX cameras—a whopping 400% increase from 10 years ago. In fact, taking even a cursory look on film TikTok is enough to know that IMAX is having a moment and it isn't going away anytime soon.
Considering the kind of movies that the word IMAX brings to mind today, it’s crazy to think that the company spent the first three decades of its existence producing documentaries to play in its gargantuan, concert-like cinemas. That all changed in the early ‘00s with the IMAX releases of movies like The Matrix Revolutions and Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones. Then came Nolan’s The Dark Knight in 2008, which became the first narrative release to be partially shot using 70mm cameras. Now, with The Odyssey, Nolan has also become the first director to shoot an entire feature using those same enormous cameras.
In the 18 years between The Dark Knight and his Homeric epic, IMAX 70MM (and its digital equivalent) has become a byword for an experience that you genuinely can’t get at home, no matter how big your TV is. It's the gold standard for enormous blockbusters like Avengers: Endgame and Dune: Part Two, but there are also a handful of more obscure movies that you might not have realised were given the same treatment.
Check out seven lesser-known IMAX-certified features in the list below—where you’ll also find info on where to watch them in all the usual places, if not always in their intended format.
The Dark Knight justifiably takes the credit for introducing IMAX 70MM to narrative movies. However, Nolan’s first brush with the technology actually came a couple of years earlier on The Prestige—a gripping gem of a movie about rival magicians, set in Victorian-era London and starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale.
The behind-the-scenes story goes that Nolan and his D.P. Wally Pfister used the IMAX camera to film the scene where Alfred Borden (Bale) chopped his finger off as an experiment to see whether the image could be scaled for a regular theatrical release.
Of course, they pulled it off and were ready to use the technique on a much larger canvas when they started to film The Dark Knight a few months later.
Unfortunately, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life didn’t get an IMAX release in 2010, but it’s probably the greatest art film ever shot using IMAX 70MM film.
The semi-autobiographical story begins by focusing on a middle-class family living in Texas in the 1950s before expanding in an unforgettable sequence at around the halfway point to show a brief history of the cosmos and life on Earth.
In a way, those 70MM scenes were kind of like Malick's god-tier version of the nature films that IMAX used to be known for. He eventually rereleased those sequences in an expanded feature version titled Voyage of Time in 2016.
For a fun and exciting sci-fi movie that made half a billion at the box office, it’s strange that Luc Besson’s Lucy didn't leave more of a cultural footprint—which is also why it's now one of the more obscure movies to be partially shot using IMAX equipment.
Starring Scarlett Johansson and released in 2014—during a remarkable 12-month run of sci-fi movies that included Her and Under the Skin—Lucy tells the story of a woman who accidentally ingests a drug that unlocks her mind’s full potential, which, of course, gives her telekinetic abilities.
As the scenes were cropped for release, it’s difficult to know exactly which parts were shot on IMAX film, but keep an eye out for clearer resolution when the character's mind is expanding. Speaking about the movie at the time of release, Besson said that the large format film allowed him “to bring the gradual awakening that our heroine is experiencing directly to the audience.”
Now 96 years young, Clint Eastwood is basically Hollywood’s grandad, but that didn’t stop him from being a technological pioneer when he set out to film Sully in 2015. It's odd to think, but Eastwood’s account of "Sully" Sullenberger’s heroic emergency landing on the Hudson River in 2009 was the first narrative movie to be entirely shot on IMAX digital format.
The plan had originally been to only shoot the plane landing sequences using IMAX, but a day or so into production, Clint decided to stop messing around and simply use the cameras to shoot the whole damn thing. Not bad for an old gunslinger.
For 2018’s First Man, Damien Chazelle took one small step for cinema by becoming the first director to use 70MM IMAX cameras to film a prestige biopic. Granted, as biopic subjects go, they don’t come more otherworldly than Neil Armstrong, but Chazelle’s decision to use 70MM cameras to shoot the climactic lunar surface sequences is still a small but significant landmark in movie history.
Chazelle’s rise in the industry to that point had, of course, been nothing short of sensational: receiving his first Oscar nomination for Whiplash when he was 29 years old and his first win for directing La La Land two years later.
First Man was his hotly anticipated follow-up to that musical smash, and while it didn’t quite connect with audiences in the same way, it’s now seen by some as Chazelle’s hidden masterpiece.
You might have hated it—heck, you might not have even seen it—but Todd Phillips’ flawed and fascinating Joker: Folie à Deux was partially shot using IMAX cameras. The director originally planned to use the expanded format during the scenes where Arthur Fleck’s daydreams and fantasies take over the story. However, he eventually used them elsewhere.
Phillips' audacious follow-up to his hugely successful 2019 Oscar-winner was an infamous bomb. Still, if you like the idea of a filmmaker intentionally trolling some of his own fans, I’d cautiously recommend giving it a watch.
Like Folie à Deux, Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine didn’t live up to its commercial (or Oscar) expectations. Yet it shares the distinction of being an underrated movie that was partially shot with IMAX cameras. In this case, the mighty 70MM.
The film—a strange and introspective biopic on the early MMA star Mark Kerr (played by The Rock)—was actually filmed on several different formats, including television and VHS cameras, to capture the era's texture and feel.
Most of the film was thus shot in 16MM—which gives it that warm, grainy aesthetic—but Safdie also integrated a few 70MM sequences into the final film. According to Safdie, this includes the first handheld zoom shot ever filmed on the famously bulky machine.
