The reason why Oppenheimer’s reel measures 11 miles and weighs 600 pounds

In case the three hours long duration was not enough. As if that wasn’t pretty cool basing your entire promotion on sharing black and white photos of Cillian Murphy. As if it were not enough to go to the cinema with the promise that they have recreated a nuclear explosion without CGI. In case you didn’t already sell us the ticket of Nolan’s only 18+ rated film since Memento. Oppenheimer kept one last and crucial piece of information to go down in film history: it measures 11 miles and weighs 600 pounds.

As informed by Associated Press, Oppenheimer’s IMAX prints measure 11 miles and weigh 600 pounds (or 17 kilometers and 272 kilos). As usual for him, Nolan insisted on shooting his new film in this format, with all that this entails at the production level.

Why see Oppenheimer on IMAX?

The director argued that this is the “best possible experience.” “The sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled. The headline, for me, is by shooting on IMAX 70mm film, you’re really letting the screen disappear. You’re getting a feeling of 3D without the glasses. You’ve got a huge screen and you’re filling the peripheral vision of the audience. You’re immersing them in the world of the film. We’re able to do things with picture now that before we were really only able to do with sound in terms of an oversize impact for the audience—an almost physical sense of response to the film.”

The great debate around this format is not so much about the weight and length of the reels, but about whether it is worth it with the number of theaters with true IMAX screens that there are. In the United States, for example, there are barely 25 theaters, while in countries like Spain there are only 4.

In any case, each new piece of information about Oppenheimer sounds even more epic than the last, and we burn with the desire to see what seems to be one of the bomb movies of the summer.