So why hasn’t IMAX just built more? According to IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond, the answer is surprisingly simple: It isn’t practical.

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“The problem is they haven’t made new IMAX film projectors in about 50 years. So we retrofit them, we rebuild them, and part of our strategy is to see how far we could take it. But certainly, demand-driven, I’d like to see more.”

When asked why IMAX couldn’t just manufacture brand-new 15/70 film projectors, he said the idea simply isn’t realistic.

“We build new projectors every day, but film projectors using this film, it’s not practical. So we’ve got to find them, and we’ve got to rebuild them, which is what we did for The Odyssey. But can all 2,000 of our theaters have the film projectors? No, there’s just not that many around. But I think we could continue to grow it.”

In other words, the issue isn’t that IMAX doesn’t want more 70mm screens. The original projectors stopped being manufactured decades ago, meaning the company now has to hunt down existing machines, restore them and keep them running instead of producing new ones from scratch.

Building an entirely new production line for a format used by only a handful of blockbuster releases would be an enormous investment, and films made specifically for IMAX 1570 are still incredibly rare.

As incredible as the format looks, Christopher Nolan is still the exception rather than the rule. Most cinemas simply can’t justify investing in specialist equipment for a format that only comes around every few years.