How an Abandoned Technology Became a Multimillion-Dollar Opportunity
Nolan’s success does not come from preserving old technology. It comes from using it to create an experience that no one else can easily replicate.
A few days ago, I tried to get tickets for The Odyssey in Istanbul.
Sold out.
I checked the next day.
Sold out again.
Then the day after that.
Still sold out.
I honestly can’t remember the last time a film I decided to see on a whim was completely booked for three or four days straight.
Isn’t that a little strange at a time when so many people keep telling us cinema is dead?
We have enormous screens at home. We have Netflix. We have Disney+. We can pause a film, rewind it, watch it from bed, and glance at our phones whenever we lose interest.
Humanity has reached the technological point where we can watch Odysseus’s ten-year journey home without ever leaving the sofa.
And yet people are still fighting for seats to see a film in a cinema.
And not only in Istanbul.
Thousands of people have reportedly travelled from across Europe to Prague just to see the film in true 70mm IMAX.
One family drove for three days from Norway. By the end of July, the Prague cinema had welcomed more than 22,000 viewers, running four or five screenings a day, including midnight showings.
The reason this particular cinema could do that is almost absurd.
While everyone else was switching to digital, it never got around to replacing its old projector.
That “laziness” eventually made it one of only 41 cinemas in the world capable of showing the film in true 70mm IMAX.
The technology its competitors abandoned became its competitive advantage.
Of course, keeping an old projector in your basement is not enough to persuade people to drive for three days.
Someone has to make that projector meaningful again.
That person was Christopher Nolan.
Nolan’s Real Product Isn’t the Film
The Odyssey is the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX film cameras.
That is easy to say.
It is much harder to do.
IMAX cameras are not merely enormous. They are also extremely loud. In the past, filmmakers generally used them for large action sequences, then switched to smaller cameras for quiet dialogue scenes.
Nolan refused to accept that compromise.
To shoot the entire film in the same format, he worked with IMAX to develop a custom enclosure that reduced the camera’s noise. Together, the camera and its soundproof housing became a colossal piece of machinery weighing roughly 180 kilograms.
The film stock also had to be changed about every three minutes.
A normal producer would look at all this and ask:
“Is any of this really necessary?”
Nolan’s answer is almost a summary of his entire career:
“Yes.”
But this insistence is not simply a technical fetish.
Nolan loves scale.
He loves explosions, oceans, wars, outer space, atomic bombs, collapsing cities, and time bending in on itself.
But those things are not what make his films truly interesting.
Nolan searches for enormous emotional contradictions inside enormous stories.
He does not use IMAX only to enlarge the world.
He uses it to enlarge the fracture inside a human being.
The Small Knot Inside the Epic
Most of us already know at least something about the world of The Odyssey.
The Trojan Horse. The Cyclops. The Sirens. The gods. A great warrior trying to make his way home.
But the centre of the story is not merely a collection of mythical creatures and naval battles.
It is a man who cannot escape the consequences of his own intelligence.
Odysseus is known above all for his cunning. He wins through strategy rather than brute strength. The Trojan Horse is the most famous example.
He turns an object people believe to be a gift into a machine of death.
It is a brilliant tactic.
It is also a deception that pushes ethical boundaries to their limit.
His intelligence wins the war.
But it does not end the story.
On the contrary, it begins the real one.
To me, Odysseus’s journey home is not only a struggle against gods and monsters. It is a long reckoning with his own decisions, his pride, his desires, and the consequences of the intelligence he chose to use.
That structure is perfectly suited to Nolan.
There was a similar man at the centre of Oppenheimer.
A man intelligent enough to solve one of the most complex scientific problems in history, yet unprepared to live with what that solution would do to the world.
Building the atomic bomb was a technical achievement.
Living with that achievement was a human tragedy.
This is exactly the territory Nolan keeps returning to:
The distance between the triumph of intelligence and the defeat of the human being.
The difference between an idea that works and an idea that is right.
The way winning a war changes the person who won it.
The vast stories, images, and budgets exist for this reason.
Not to conceal the emotional conflict, but to magnify it until it becomes impossible to ignore.
Why Do People Still Go to the Cinema?
At this point, it becomes easier to understand why the old projector in Prague suddenly became so valuable.
The projector alone is not an advantage.
The IMAX camera alone is not an advantage.
Homer’s ancient story alone is not an advantage.
Even Nolan’s name is not enough on its own.
The success comes from the way all these elements reinforce one another.
Nolan took an old story that everyone thought they already knew and connected it to the inner contradictions human beings have never managed to escape.
To tell that story, he chose a technology so difficult that most directors would never dare to use it for an entire film.
Rather than accept the limitations of the technology, he had the camera redesigned.
The small number of true IMAX projectors left in the world then became part of the film’s distribution system.
Scarcity transformed a screening into an event.
People travelled not merely to consume the content, but to become part of the experience.
Remove any link from this chain and the result changes.
If the film had been shot in an ordinary format, the projector in Prague would matter less.
If the story were nothing more than a visual spectacle, the film would become a three-hour technical demonstration.
If the projectors had not been preserved, there would be nowhere to show Nolan’s images in the form he intended.
And if the emotional centre failed, people might praise the image quality but forget the film a few days later.
This is why it is not enough to say that preserving old technology creates a competitive advantage.
A more accurate statement would be: An abandoned capability becomes a competitive advantage when it is connected to a powerful new human need.
Netflix Didn’t Kill Cinema
Netflix became exceptionally good at performing one particular function of cinema:
Making content easy to access.
Going to the cinema is inconvenient.
You have to choose a specific time. Sit in traffic. Find somewhere to park.
The person next to you may chew popcorn like an industrial crushing machine.
Watching at home is easier than all of that.
So if cinemas try to compete with Netflix on convenience, they will lose.
But the purpose of cinema is not merely to move an image onto a screen.
It had started to feel that way because the industry spent years making the experience increasingly ordinary.
The same auditoriums. The same small screens. The same digital images. The same popcorn.
Cinemas had already started turning themselves into Netflix before Netflix arrived.
Netflix simply performed that job better at home.
Nolan is moving in the opposite direction.
He has not made cinema easier.
He has made it even more difficult.
He does not tell the audience, “You can watch this film anywhere.”
He tells them, “If you want to truly see this film, you need to come to the right place.”
According to conventional business logic, that sounds like a terrible distribution network.
Fewer venues. More expensive infrastructure. More difficult operations. Limited capacity.
But as this example shows, reducing friction is not always the solution to a distribution problem.
Sometimes, when friction becomes part of the product, it strengthens the power of the distribution network rather than weakening it.
When you create an experience people will want to talk about once they reach it, the journey and the difficulty do not reduce its value.
They prove it.
This Is How We Should Look at “Dead” Businesses
In business, we love announcing that certain categories are dead.
Physical retail is dead.
Sales calls are dead.
Newsletters are dead.
Human customer service is dead.
Cinema is dead.
But perhaps the category itself is not dead.
Perhaps only the version that can be easily replaced has died.
An ordinary cinema experience can be replaced by a large television at home.
A screening that makes people travel to another country cannot be replaced so easily.
A generic sales call can be replaced by an automated email. But understanding a customer’s business better than they understand it themselves is much harder to replace.
A newsletter written like a press release can be produced by AI in seconds. But an original insight drawn from twenty years of experience, one that genuinely changes the reader’s decision is not so easily replaced.
Standard customer service can be automated with a bot. But human judgement capable of understanding an angry, complicated customer and saving the relationship is much harder to replace.
I do not think the greatest opportunities of the future will emerge only in entirely new categories.
They will also emerge in the parts of supposedly “dead” categories that digitalisation abandoned, even though human beings still need them.
The goal is not to bring the old business back exactly as it was.
Imitating the 1980s is not a strategy for selling vinyl records.
Keeping an old projector operational is not a strategy by itself either.
The real question is:
As technology standardised this business, which human value did it remove from the system?
Ritual?
Trust?
Belonging?
Craftsmanship?
Excitement?
The feeling of experiencing something together?
Once you find that value, an old capability that everyone else abandoned can become meaningful again.
Not Everything Old Is a Future Opportunity
There is an obvious danger here: nostalgia.
Something does not become valuable merely because it existed in the past.
Nor does difficulty make something valuable.
Doing a job manually does not automatically make it better than automating it.
Nolan’s success does not come from romanticising old technology.
It comes from understanding what that technology can still do uniquely well.
He then creates modern demand around that capability.
That distinction matters.
Successful revivals do not recreate the past exactly as it was.
They connect a unique capability from the past to an unresolved human need in the present.
The cinema in Prague preserved the projector.
Nolan gave it a purpose again.
Homer provided the story.
IMAX provided the scale.
Nolan placed human conflict at the centre.
And the audience contributed its time, its money, and sometimes a three-day journey.
Competitive advantage, as you can see, rarely comes from one brilliant decision.
It comes from a chain of decisions that reinforce one another.
So the next time I encounter a business that people say is “finished,” I no longer want to ask only:
“Would anyone still use this?”
There is a better question:
For which version of this business would people be willing to cross a country or even change countries?
Because cinema did not die.
The kind of cinema people could more easily watch at home did.
That distinction will always matter.