Big screen titans: Tom Cruise (left) and Christopher Nolan
Tom Cruise neutralized hostile foreign powers, thwarted deep state conspiracies, overcame the sound barrier, climbed the Burj Khalifa and defied the limitations of mortal man's knee joints, all for fun. But in Christopher Nolan, the mild-mannered director of Dunkirk and Interstellar with a careless fringe, the irresistible force of cinema may finally have met its unshakable goal.
These two titans of the blockbuster business are currently at loggerheads over the world's Imax theaters: in particular, who will be playing them and for how long during the upcoming summer break. Cruise's Mission: Impossible: The Wage of Death Part 1 is due out on July 14 and will air on all 52 Imax screens currently operating in the UK.
However, just over a week later, Nolan's Oppenheimer hits the scene: a three-hour historical thriller about the father of the atomic bomb, shot entirely on Imax cameras, whose images are rich and clear enough to withstand an explosion. -the size of the cloud.
And thanks to a deal struck between Imax and Oppenheimer's parent studio Universal back in 2021, while the Mission: Impossible release date was still pushed back due to Covid-related delays, Nolan's film was booked at each of these premium seats – plus one more, at London's Science Museum.
Three UK sites – London's BFI Imax, Manchester's Printworks Vue and one at the Science Museum – will project film from physical 70mm film: 11 gleaming miles of freshly printed celluloid, each frame as crisp as an 18-kilopixel digital image. , and collectively as heavy as an adult male silverback gorilla. The rest will show the digital version, which has been scanned from the original print at 8k and then scaled down to 4k, with the original full Imax sound mix. (If even John Lewis's AV department makes you dizzy, it's time to start doing your homework.)
This is great news for format fans – and of course for anyone who shares Nolan's principle of that movie theaters should offer something that a home sofa simply cannot reproduce.
But that's far less exciting for Cruise, whose Top Gun: Maverick filled the premium halls all last summer with $110 million (out of his $1.5 billion global earnings), and is set to pull his latest film from the same venues in just a week. . Silent-era star Douglas Fairbanks once remarked that a man in Hollywood is only as good as his last film: Cruz must be wondering where even that paltry grace period has gone.
2008 Imax screen of The Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan. Photo: WireImage
Interesting? Fuming seems to like it better. According to a recent account by the well-informed Matthew Belloni of Puck, the man who just four months ago was credited with “saving Hollywood ass” no less than Steven Spielberg is furious at this perceived slight.
Cruz and his team are currently trying to secure long-term bookings in the widescreen venues of their own brand of multiplexes – in the UK, Cineworld's Superscreens, Vue's Xtreme Screens, etc. – with the (very reasonable) argument that nearly three hours of Cruise, hanging from biplanes, motorcycles racing off cliffs and so on are likely to appeal to a wider audience than Nolan's gritty nuclear opus.
Nevertheless, it is Nolan IMAX that has to thank the company for its current status as a premium entertainment brand. Before The Dark Knight became the first major Hollywood production to use the format in 2008, it was primarily used for science and nature documentaries: cameras were considered too loud and bulky for use on conventional film sets.
Christopher Nolan practices an Imax camera on Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy. Image Credit & Copyright: Universal Pictures
But critics and audiences alike have been convinced of its potential from the very beginning of The Dark Knight: a sweeping shot of Gotham's glass towers, proving the power of the photographic image in the early days of CGI Peak. (A company executive recently told me that Nolan's use of this format has strengthened their business and brand “immeasurably.”)
Cruz and Nolan aren't the only two showmen in town. Before the release of Mission: Impossible 7, UK Imaxes will be playing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Doom. And despite Cruz's current intense dissatisfaction, prior to the post-pandemic drought that kept Top Gun: Maverick running for months, the latest studio releases were typically played online for only a week or two before they were transferred to mainstream screens.
< p>But as of 2021, so-called premium formats like Imax and the associated premium ticket prices have become the centerpiece of cinema recovery plans. And when the cost of protecting a production from Covid can run into the tens of millions of dollars, studios also need the extra revenue they can generate every day.
Big movie. Big screen. I liked it very much. pic.twitter.com/DrAY5tRg5P
— Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) August 25, 2020
It's funny to imagine the two of them mumbling darkly about each other to their assistants, Cruise is more than Nolan than an old-fashioned battle of Hollywood egos. The two – an intelligent, neatly dressed British director and a Hollywood icon with a gleaming smirk – are kindred spirits in many ways.
Both are unshakable believers in the power of cinema as mass art: when The Nolan Reason opened between lockdowns in August 2020, it was Cruise, wearing a mask, who stepped on the stump on his behalf, urging everyone to “come back to the movies.” in a viral video filmed in – where else? – The biggest Imax in Britain. Incredibly, despite all their propaganda and commercial success, neither of them has yet won an Oscar, which puts both of them on the fringes of the Hollywood establishment. (Nolan was nominated for five, and the cruise was nominated for four.)
Most revealingly, though, like every self-respecting plastic bag-crushing flea-pit dweller, each of them has recently admitted to having favorite cinema. seat. For Cruz, it's the back row with the baseball cap pulled tight; for Nolan, it is “the middle of the third row” for standard views and “a little behind the centerline right down the middle” for Imax. Even though they brawl on the biggest battleground in Hollywood, they both end up marching on the same side.
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