2 Bay Area Theaters Screen 'Oppenheimer' In Large-Screen Format

DUBLIN, CA — Only 30 theaters worldwide are playing the movie "Oppenheimer" in the large-screen format for which it is intended to be played — and two of them are in the Bay Area.

The film centers around the "father" of the atomic bomb, Julius Robert Oppenheimer, and some of its scenes feature the University of California, Berkeley campus, where Oppenheimer was a professor of physics from 1929 to 1943.

The AMC Metreon 16 theater in San Francisco and the Regal Hacienda Crossings theater in Dublin are the two venues in the Bay presenting the movie in the 70mm format.

The film was shot using one of the highest resolution cameras available today, a combination of IMAX 65mm and Panavision 65mm film stock. It is then best projected on IMAX 70mm, which Bay Area moviegoers can enjoy.

What's special about seeing the movie in the 70mm presentation is essentially the sheer size of the screen. Only in these theaters will sequences expand vertically to fill the entire screen. This differs from the more common 35mm IMAX screens, where the top and bottom get cropped.

It's also the first time in history that a movie has combined shooting in IMAX 65mm with IMAX black-and-white analog photography.

The movie was directed by Christopher Nolan, who is known for his action-packed blockbuster films that make little use of computer-generated imagery, or CGI. Nolan did not use any CGI for "Oppenheimer," which adds to the visual appeal of the film.

This is Nolan's sixth film to be shot on IMAX 65mm, following "The Dark Knight" in 2008, "The Dark Knight Rises" in 2012, "Interstellar" in 2014, "Dunkirk" in 2017 and "Tenet" in 2020.
"Oppenheimer" will premiere this Friday.

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