Star Wars Joins the 70mm Revival — and IMAX Says at Least Four More Secret Films Are Shooting on Film for 2027

3 min read · 746 words

Read in: English · Español · Русский · 中文 · Português

When The Odyssey opened this summer, the constraint wasn’t demand — it was hardware. Christopher Nolan’s film was shot entirely on IMAX 15/70 film, and only about 30 theaters on Earth could actually project it that way. Tickets to those rooms resold on eBay for as much as $2,000. For a format the industry had quietly written off a decade ago, that is a stunning signal — and IMAX just told investors it intends to answer it.

On the company’s mid-2026 earnings call, CEO Rich Gelfond said IMAX has at least four unannounced films slated for a true 70mm release in 2027, and that five or more movies will likely arrive “on film” that year. The first of those secrets is no longer a secret: it is Star Wars.

What IMAX’s CEO actually said

Gelfond’s framing matters because the bottleneck is physical. IMAX hasn’t manufactured a new 15/70 film projector in roughly half a century; the network runs on refurbished, decades-old machines, several of them rebuilt specifically for The Odyssey. Rather than build new units — the full blueprints and the engineers who understand them are largely gone — IMAX is hunting down broken and abandoned projectors and restoring them. The company’s stated plan is to add roughly ten projectors, about a 30% jump in capacity by 2027, with a longer-term goal of around 75 working 70mm units worldwide.

Approximate company targets. ~30 theaters ran The Odyssey in true 15/70 this year.

Star Wars goes 70mm

On September 9, Lucasfilm and IMAX confirmed that Star Wars: Starfighter — the new standalone film directed by Shawn Levy and starring Ryan Gosling as a rogue named Kade Auberon — was shot with IMAX-certified film cameras and will be released in IMAX 70mm. Its date is loaded with meaning: May 28, 2027, the 50th anniversary weekend of the original Star Wars. Alongside it, the 1977 original — A New Hope — returns to IMAX 70mm for its 50th anniversary. The supporting cast for Starfighter includes Matt Smith, Mia Goth, Aaron Pierre, Amy Adams, Jamael Westman and Daniel Ings.

That makes Gosling the first A-list star since Nolan to build a tentpole explicitly around the format — and it hands IMAX a franchise-scale reason to have those refurbished projectors ready.

Film	What it is	Release	On IMAX film?
Star Wars: Starfighter	New feature (Levy / Gosling)	May 28, 2027	Yes — shot with IMAX film cameras
Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)	50th-anniversary re-release	2027	Presented in IMAX 70mm
“At least four” more	Unannounced, per IMAX CEO	2027	Shooting on film

Why the format keeps winning the top of the market

This is not nostalgia for its own sake. In the USA Times Star Index — our twenty-year database of every film that took over a week at the U.S. box office — the biggest films are overwhelmingly the ones that opened or played in IMAX. Among the rarest, highest-share “Geuse” films (61.8%+ of a week), roughly 96% reached an IMAX screen. The format has become shorthand for “this is the one to leave the house for,” and a true 70mm print is the most extreme version of that promise. The catch, as The Odyssey showed, is that the supply of real 70mm rooms is tiny — which is exactly the gap IMAX is now racing to close before Star Wars arrives.

If IMAX hits even the modest end of its plan, 2027 becomes the first year in a generation with a genuine slate of film-shot blockbusters rather than a lone Nolan event. For the top tier of the box office, that is the story to watch.

Sources & method

Projector counts and the 2027 slate are drawn from IMAX’s public comments (CEO Rich Gelfond, 2026) and trade reporting; the Star Wars details are from Lucasfilm/IMAX’s September 2026 announcement. Fleet figures are approximate company targets, not audited totals. Star Index shares are computed from Box Office Mojo weekly domestic charts, 2006–2026 (2020 excluded as a pandemic anomaly).