Dark Knight Rises Will Contain an Hour of IMAX

According to the Wall Street Journal, when Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises opens on July 20, it will contain the most IMAX footage ever for a Hollywood feature — more than an hour’s worth. That’s a whole lotta neck-craning to see the caped crusader. But fans are sure to line up for the mega-screen version.

Back in November 2010 it was rumored that Nolan might shoot all of the film in IMAX. In fact, Nolan’s agreement to direct Dark Knight was contingent on Warner Bros. allowing him to shoot the film with the noisy, 90-pound cameras despite initial push back. “There was a huge irony that we were told it would be too difficult to shoot a Hollywood movie on IMAX…These were cameras that had been to the top of Mount Everest, to the bottom of the ocean and into outer space, but people thought we couldn’t make a feature film. It was absurd,” Nolan told the Journal.

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Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight also made strategic use of IMAX footage—40 minutes-worth. That film was pushed out of the top-10 highest grossing films of all time (it stands at #11) this year by The Hunger Games — a film that did so well on IMAX screens that it’s returning to them later this week. And though James Cameron has been pushing that other Hollywood trend, 3D, it should be noted that when Titanic was released earlier this month at 79 IMAX theaters domestically, IMAX accounted for nine out of 10 top-performing locations. It seems that movie-goers aren’t kvetching yet about ponying up a few extra dollars for the big, big screen.