Why Tom Cruise and Christopher Nolan are fighting over Imax screens

Tom Cruise has neutralised hostile foreign powers, smashed deep state conspiracies, broken the sound barrier, scaled the Burj Khalifa, and defied the limits of mortal man’s knee joints, all in the cause of entertainment. But in Christopher Nolan – the mild-mannered, floppy-fringed director of Dunkirk and Interstellar – cinema’s unstoppable force may have finally met his immovable object.

These two titans of the blockbuster business are currently at loggerheads over the world’s Imax cinemas: specifically, who gets to play with them, and for how long, during the coming summer holiday break. Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1 is due to open on July 14, and will play on all 52 of the Imax screens currently operating in the UK.

Just over a week after that, however, Nolan’s Oppenheimer will arrive on the scene: a three-hour historical thriller about the father of the atom bomb shot entirely on the Imax cameras whose images are rich and sharp enough to withstand being blown up to mushroom-cloud size.

And thanks to a deal brokered between Imax and Oppenheimer’s parent studio Universal back in 2021, while Mission: Impossible’s release date was still slipping around due to Covid-related delays, Nolan’s film has been booked into every single one of those premium venues – plus one more, in London’s Science Museum, for good measure.

Three of the UK sites – the London BFI Imax, Manchester’s Printworks Vue and the Science Museum one – will project the film from a physical 70mm film print: 11 glistening miles of freshly struck celluloid, every frame of it as crisp as an 18k digital image, and collectively as heavy as an adult male silverback gorilla. The others will show the digital version, which has been scanned from the original print at 8k then scaled down to 4k, with the original full-blast Imax sound mix. (If even the AV department at John Lewis makes your head spin, it’s time to start doing your homework.)

This is wonderful news for format geeks – and, indeed, anyone on board with Nolan’s maxim that the cinemas should offer something a domestic sofa-bound setup simply can’t replicate.

But it’s rather less thrilling for Cruise, whose Top Gun: Maverick filled premium venues all last summer to the tune of $110 million (of its $1.5 billion global takings), and is going to have his latest film turfed out of those same venues after only a week. The silent era star Douglas Fairbanks once observed that in Hollywood, a man was only as good as his last picture: Cruise must be wondering where even that measly grace period went.

Wondering? Fuming is apparently more like it. According to a recent report by the well-informed Matthew Belloni at Puck, the man credited with “saving Hollywood’s ass” just four months ago by no less a figure than Steven Spielberg is furious over this perceived slight.

Cruise and his team are currently trying to secure long-term bookings in multiplexes’ own-brand large-format auditoriums – in the UK, Cineworld’s Superscreens, Vue’s Xtreme Screens, and so on – with the (very reasonable) argument that almost three hours of Cruise dangling from biplanes, driving motorcycles off cliffs and so on is likely to appeal to a wider audience than Nolan’s stern-looking nuclear opus.

Yet it’s Nolan IMAX has to thank for their company’s current status as a premium entertainment brand. Before The Dark Knight became the first major Hollywood production to use the format in 2008, it was largely used for science and nature documentaries: the cameras were considered too loud and unwieldy for use on a conventional set.

But critics and audiences alike were sold on its potential right from The Dark Knight’s shivery opening: a field-of-vision-swamping shot of glassy Gotham towers that reasserted the power of the photographic image at the dawn of Peak CG. (One of the company’s executives recently told me Nolan’s embrace of the format had strengthened their business and brand “beyond measure”.)

Nor are Cruise and Nolan the only two showmen in town. Before the release of Mission: Impossible 7, UK Imaxes will play Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. And despite Cruise’s current high dudgeon, before the post-pandemic drought that allowed Top Gun: Maverick to run for months, the network would typically only play the latest studio releases for a week or two before they migrated to ordinary screens.

But since 2021, the so-called premium formats like Imax – and the premium ticket prices that go with them – have become a central plank of cinemas’ recovery plans. And when the cost of Covid-proofing a production can run into the tens of millions of dollars, studios also need every day of extra revenue they can fence off for themselves.

Yet fun as it is to imagine the two of them muttering darkly about one another to their PAs, there’s more to Cruise versus Nolan than an old-fashioned battle of Hollywood egos. These two – the cerebral, neatly dressed British director and the gleaming-grinned, mirror-shaded Hollywood icon – are, in many ways, kindred spirits.

Both have an unshakeable belief in the power of film as a mass art: when Nolan’s Tenet opened in August 2020 between lockdowns, it was a masked Cruise who went out on the stump on his behalf, urging everyone to get “back to the movies” in a viral video shot at – where else? – Britain’s biggest Imax. For all their advocacy and commercial success, incredibly, neither has yet won an Oscar, situating them both on the fringe of the Hollywood establishment. (Nolan has been nominated for five; Cruise four.)

Most telling of all, however, like every self-respecting plastic-bag-crinkling denizen of the fleapit, each has recently disclosed they have a favourite cinema seat. For Cruise, it’s the back row with his baseball cap pulled down tight; for Nolan it’s the “middle of the third row” for standard screenings, and “a little behind the centre line right up at the middle” for Imax. Even as they scrap over Hollywood’s biggest battleground, both are ultimately marching with the same side.