THE ORIGINAL STAR WARS IS COMING TO IMAX 70MM THEATERS IN 2027:

70mm IMAX film is very special and requires purpose-built projectors and huge screens. The 15-perforation 70mm film is in a tall 1.43:1 aspect ratio, very different from the more standard cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio of many movies.

It will be interesting to see how Disney handles Star Wars: A New Hope in 70mm, since the original theatrical release was shot on 35mm film with anamorphic lenses to achieve a wide aspect ratio of 2.35:1. That’s very far from 1.43:1.

Presumably, the original 35mm film will go through IMAX’s proprietary Digital Media Remastering (DMR) process, a sophisticated form of upscaling and image processing that ensures movies filmed on non-IMAX formats still look great on the big screen.

That sounds like a lot of digital processing to upscale a 35mm film to the 70mm Imax format. If there’s a 70mm Imax theater near you, certainly go for it. But I suspect the original 1977 Star Wars will still look awfully impressive in a digital Imax theater, and they’re far more ubiquitous. As the above linked article notes, there are about 400 Imax theaters in the US and Canada, but “Relatively few theaters worldwide can project IMAX 70mm film prints. Per DFIrentals, there are only about 41 of them, which is less than 3% of all IMAX-certified theaters. Roughly 30 of these 70mm theaters are in the United States.”