To the 'MAX

One of the biggest pictures of the summer gets even bigger in IMAX.

“If you didn’t watch the film and looked at people watching it, you’d see they’re constantly ducking and grabbing at things,” says IMAX president Greg Foster, bragging about its 3-D films. If you haven’t been IMAXed lately, times have changed. IMAX has ramped up to 3-D. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, now showing at Navy Pier, is the latest film to get the IMAX treatment.

 

“When I was a kid,” Foster says, “the studios knew they had the 12- to 24-year-olds on opening weekend. They’re more elusive today. They’re home playing video games or watching DVDs on their parents’ 70-inch plasma TVs. They’re not going to the multiplexes to the same degree. You have to give them something they can’t replicate at home."

 

That’s where 3-D comes in. IMAX 3-D consists of two separate strips of film projected simultaneously onto a screen. The brain fuses these images into one through the process of stereopsis. For the 3-D sequences, the audience dons polarized glasses that are aligned with the light from megapowered IMAX projectors.

 

Technobabble aside, for Harry Potter junkies this translates into a 20-minute finale that has been converted into IMAX 3-D. The preceding 118 minutes are 2-D. (Despite all the money and manpower deployed, IMAX can’t rip out a feature-length, nondigital film entirely in 3-D…yet.) Once you’ve hit the 118-minute mark, the film will flash green Harry Potter glasses on the bottom of the screen. This is your signal to get out the glasses and get nerdy.

 

As technology improves, the 3-D conversion gets faster. It took three months to process Apollo 13, three weeks for The Matrix Revolutions and ten days for Spider-Man 3.

 

Down the road, the vast majority [of films] will be in 3-D. We’ll see some kind of enhanced, interactive experience,” Foster says. “I have all the confidence in the world that what will take place in the home, in 3-D or in theaters will be at the forefront of innovation, imagination and invention.”—Adam Fendelman

 

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is now playing in 3-D IMAX at Navy Pier. See Indie & revival.

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