Interstellar's IMAX rerelease has been punted to December

Christopher Nolan cemented his status as the crown prince of IMAX with his record-breaking Oppenheimer run, but fans will have to wait a while longer to see Interstellar on the biggest screen around. But wait, you might be thinking. Wasn’t IMAX supposed to screen Interstellar in 70mm literally next month? Well, as Cooper’s (Matthew McConaughey) interpretation of Murphy’s law proclaims, “whatever can happen, will happen,” and something certainly happened here. That being said, the what of it all may take a little interdimensional Morse code to piece together.

This afternoon, after growing speculation, Variety reported that the 10th-anniversary rerelease has been pushed out to December 6. The initial, September 27 re-release of Nolan’s beloved 2014 epic about an astronaut who sets out to save humanity was first announced back in April, to much cinephile fanfare. As of this afternoon, the rerelease was not listed among IMAX’s slate of upcoming films, raising alarm among fans and sparking rumors that the studio took a few hours to put out. 

But… why? As of this writing, neither Paramount, IMAX, nor Christopher Nolan’s Syncopy Inc. production company have responded to The A.V. Club‘s requests for comment on this story. It is notable that Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is currently scheduled for a September 27 premiere—the same date originally slated for Interstellar—with Joker: Folie à Deux following in close succession on October 4. This may have just been a matter of prioritizing screens for new releases.

Per Variety’s report, unnamed studio sources dispute the rumor that was floating around social media. Today, a Twitter/X post from an account called “Christopher Nolan Art & Updates” went viral with a pretty incendiary allegation: Paramount destroyed almost all of its 70mm prints without Nolan’s knowledge, the account claimed, effectively canceling the release and leaving the director “furious.” “The only currently existing prints are with theaters that have the space to keep a massive print themselves in storage,” the post claims, but notes that there won’t be “much ‘official’ about those runs.” (An IMAX theater in Melbourne still seems to have their print, for example, but are advertising its run as merely a part of their “Spacetember Film Festival.”) The tweet also claims that Nolan asked Paramount to fund the production of new prints themselves, but they refused.