‘Interstellar’ and the Magic of the Movie Theater

‘Interstellar’ (MovieStillsDB)

It’s dark.

That’s the first thing you notice as you enter the cavernous IMAX theater at the Cinemark Dallas XD and IMAX on Webb Chapel Rd ahead of the day’s first¹ showing of Interstellar at 8 a.m.: The auditorium is dark. The house lights are dimmed; the screen isn’t rotating through the standard complement of advertisements and trailers; you almost have to use your phone as a flashlight to see your seat number. The speakers, however, are on; through them wafts synthesizer and organ chords from Hans Zimmer’s phenomenal score for the film.

What you’re really noticing when you enter the auditorium isn’t the dark: it’s that this is an event. You are about to be treated to a show on this screen that’s five stories tall and three stories wide. And to prepare you for this show, Cinemark has a guy on hand to walk you through what you’re about to experience on a mechanical level. IMAX 70mm is film, the projector is mechanical, and what you’re about to experience is analog (with a slight digital hand from the compact disc (!) that contains the film’s score). Nine miles of celluloid are going to shoot through the projector horizontally at 24 frames per second to give you the clearest, most pristine version of Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece that exists.

The Cinemark Dallas XD and IMAX is one of ten locations in North America capable of showing the film in the 70mm IMAX format; most of the locations showing Interstellar for its tenth-anniversary rerelease are doing so via digital and laser projectors. Which means this really was an event, at least insofar as a movie being shown six times a day ten years after its initial release can be an event. The audience knew what was up; according to an informal audience survey before the show, the furthest someone traveled to this theater was eight hours, from New Orleans to Dallas.

The screenings have been a cash cow for theaters. Doing some back-of-the-envelope math,² I estimated the film pulled in about $63,000 last weekend just at the Dallas location; the average across North America at the IMAX 70mm screens was over $70,000. (Needless to say, tickets in New York and Los Angeles cost a bit more.) Overall, the film grossed more than $4.6 million on just 165 screens last weekend; tickets were so scarce that scalpers got in on the action.

The good news is that the IMAX run has been extended: if you want to see Interstellar in the biggest and best format possible, you have more time. The bad news is that there’s still a limited number of venues even capable of playing the film in the 70mm IMAX format.

‘Interstellar’ (MovieStillsDB)

My only real question is: Why isn’t this sort of thing a regular event? There are technological limitations, of course—only so many screens of this size exist, and only so many projectors capable of projecting this format are still in operation. Another part of the answer is that Christopher Nolan is almost sui generis among modern filmmakers: There is just about no other director working today with the combined critical and commercial appeal who films his pictures in ways that would benefit from an IMAX 70mm print. Maybe you could make a case for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies. I’d certainly be curious to see what Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood would look like on 70mm IMAX, though it was shot on 35mm Kodak film; Oppenheimer, by way of comparison, was shot on 65mm film.

Maybe we just need a permanent Nolan installation at all these sites: once a year we get a two-week run of The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, or Oppenheimer (the films Nolan shot for IMAX). The market is there; the studio and the cinemas are just leaving money on the table by not doing something like this, particularly in the winter months when the IMAX fare is, shall we say, less enticing.

My point is: The demand is certainly there for at least one filmmaker, and I think it might be there for retrospectives beyond Nolan. But you have to make it an event, something special that people tell their friends about, that they can brag to others about having experienced. I myself have been telling everyone who listens about the nice little speech we got beforehand; I learned more about projectors and dust than I thought possible. I don’t know that everyone is deranged enough to make a trip from New Orleans to Dallas for every such screening. But it’s worth a shot if only to remind people how glorious the movie theater experience can be.

‘Interstellar’ (MovieStillsDB)

As for the film itself, Interstellar, well, I love it. I just … love it. It’s funny, there’s a moment in Tom Shone’s brilliant book The Nolan Variations where Shone is asking Nolan about some of the quibbles of the plotting and why it’s less clockwork-precise than some of his other efforts, and Shone says “I do like the film—” and Nolan interrupts and says: “Like it more unreservedly.”

This has always cracked me up because it is, in a way, how I experienced Interstellar. But I have a hard time disentangling my own viewing experiences from the film itself. I saw it twice in theaters. The first time I liked, but did not love, it; I more admired it than anything. Between the first and second viewings I learned that my wife was pregnant; we were going to have a girl. The second viewing—about a man who leaves his daughter to live and age and possibly die on a starving, suffocating planet while he travels the galaxy in the hopes of finding some way to save humanity—hit harder. Much harder, right in the heart.

Interstellar was marketed as hard sci-fi—ooh, we have Kip Thorne advising us; ahh, we discuss gravity and relativity—but it’s not hard sci-fi, really. Interstellar isn’t the spiritual heir of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; it’s the spiritual heir of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with all the emotional baggage of that film ramped up by 500 percent. It’s Nolan at his most Spielbergian, his most sentimental. For all the talk of Nolan being a puzzle-box filmmaker, a technician, cold and closed off, Interstellar is a movie that posits love being a force like gravity that can transcend time and space and dimensions to save humanity from its own destruction. The scientific trappings of the realistic black hole were used to cover up the fact that the movie is goopy emotional nonsense and I dig every single second of it. I have come to love the film unreservedly for the way it deals with family and parents and children and love and every time I watch it now I walk away a weeping mess.

It’s interesting: Interstellar has evolved into something of a beloved classic among normie audiences. I think that’s because it took a while for viewers to realize that this movie was more Spielberg than Kubrick, a family drama leavened with a sarcastic robot’s hijinks.

We just had to reach across time to teach people the power of love.

1. Technically, there’s a 2:20 a.m. showing, but for accounting purposes that counts as the last show of the previous day.

2. The auditorium seats 231 people and can run six showings a day between 8:00 a.m. and 2:20 a.m. Assuming that the screenings on average are 95 percent full (which is a lower-bound estimate, I think), that’s 220 or so tickets per showing. Half the screenings are matinees and half are full price; matinees run $14.25 a seat, while full-price tickets are $17.50. Under these parameters, the film is pulling in about $20,995 per screen per day at this one location. I would guess the real figure was actually a bit higher, since it seemed that most of the non-2:20 a.m. showings were either completely sold out or 99 percent sold out; this is how I wound up at an 8:00 a.m. Wednesday screening.