The Odyssey is so far the biggest movie of the year after Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It was also too big for your friendly neighborhood theater: Most people on the planet missed as much as 40% of the movie because it was filmed in Imax 70 mm’s 1.43:1 aspect ratio, a squarish shape that got cut at the top and bottom in all but 41 Imax theaters around the planet. I know people who flew from Madrid to London just to watch it. That’s money they could have spent on buying an iPhone Duo which, magically, perfectly fits Nolan’s favorite film format.
That’s right. Apple’s new thingamajig has an inner-screen ratio of 1.4217:1 in landscape mode. Nolan filmed The Odyssey on a format called “15-perforation 70 mm Imax,” which is 1.43:1. Nolan chose these cameras—as he did for Oppenheimer—because “the sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled,” he said. “You’re immersing them in the world of the film.”
The gap between the 15-perf 70 mm Imax format and the iPhone Duo’s inner display is just 0.6%. A full-frame 1.43:1 Imax image scaled to the Duo’s 2,670-pixel width would need 1,867 pixels of height (the screen is 1,878 pixels tall). That leaves roughly 11 pixels of black bars total—about five on the top, five on the bottom—which is effectively invisible.
Nolan wouldn’t object to you watching his movie on the Duo, either. The man believes that phones are perfectly fine to view his films. He would be happy to know that Apple’s foldable phone is such a close match that people will actually be able to see the movie as he originally intended while they are getting their legs numb on the toilet.
Heck, the aspect ratio match is so perfect that I’m genuinely surprised that Apple didn’t use The Odyssey in every single iPhone Duo publicity shot. The movie is now almost two months old, but its format snobbery became the object of worldwide mockery, white-people-problem criticism, and faux rage of countless internet whiners everywhere. Cupertino could have easily piggybacked on that, once again saving humanity from the suffering of just seeing the butt of that bloody Trojan horse rather than its full-size body.
But maybe, perhaps, most probably, Apple didn’t use The Odyssey because it would associate the iPhone Duo with the film’s most telling indictment: “The Odyssey is a movie where poor people literally see less.” At $2,000 a pop (minimum!), that’s still true for Cupertino’s latest snobbish extravagance. No worries, kids: Just mask your cheap Android screens with Gorilla tape whenever Nolan’s film gets released online and watch it two inches from your face.
