Captain America: Civil War Will Be Shot in IMAX

Well it’s official, if you want your superhero throwdown to be epic these days, you better unpack the IMAX cameras….but perhaps not the ones you’d expect.

Little over a month after Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice takes IMAX screens by storm, you’ll quickly be able to see Captain America, Spider-Man, and Iron Man in full IMAX glory for the first time with Captain America: Civil War. However, Civil War will also be the first major production to utilize IMAX’s new 2D Digital Arri Cameras—not the 70mm format that has made IMAX famous.

The news was released Monday via Variety, where Joe and Anthony Russo talked about being the first filmmakers to fully utilize the new IMAX-specific lens from Arri, a camera manufacturer based in Germany.

“[Digital] allows us to keep rolling and do multiple takes while keeping the energy up,” Joe Russo said in a statement. “Our motto is you can only build a film with what you bring into the editing room, and we like to bring as much as we can.”

In many respects, this turns Captain America: Civil War into its own historic milestone since it will be the first narrative feature released in which IMAX’s closely guarded (and coveted) cameras will be made to record a digital image.

Indeed, it almost seems counterintuitive to the entire pretense of directors beginning to shoot select scenes in IMAX, which was introduced to audiences and filmmakers by celluloid purist Christopher Nolan on the production of The Dark Knight. Nolan has continued to use the 65mm cameras for larger and larger portions of later blockbusters with The Dark Knight Risesand Interstellar, which has also led to other filmmakers to follow suit, including Brad Bird on Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Francis Lawrence on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and J.J. Abrams on Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

How much of Captain America: Civil War will be produced on the Arri 2D remains to be seen, but it may be the most complete film to be released in an IMAX format. Yet, if it doesn’t have the highest resolution and tangibility of film grain that made the approach such an event in The Dark Knight, I remain weary to call it “IMAX.” However, it is certainly another harbinger of the digital revolution and film’s demise when the IMAX company is starting to rely on digital cameras, as well as apparently being at work at producing digital 3D IMAX cameras for the future…