Tom Cruise isn't happy that Oppenheimer is taking up all the IMAX ...

Apparently actor Tom Cruise is “pissed” that Oppenheimer is taking up all the IMAX screens in North America. 

And we thought Barbie vs. Oppenheimer was going to be this summer’s biggest rivalry. Turns out, it’s Tom Cruise versus both of those films. 

See, July is looking pretty packed for big, summer blockbusters. Cruise’s new Mission Impossible film will crash into cinemas on 11 July. We can only expect it to be one of the biggest films of the year. 

Except that Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s candy-coloured Barbie are both coming out the following week. 

Puck reports that Nolan and Universal Pictures have managed to book all of the IMAX screens in North America for three weeks straight for Oppenheimer when it opens. Oppenheimer was filmed entirely with IMAX cameras so it will look staggeringly good on those big screens. 

A featurette released recently revealed that Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema basically created a whole new type of film in order to film some of the movie’s sequences in black and white IMAX. Talk about dedication to your craft. 

Apparently, Cruise has been “pushing exhibitors” to show his film Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 in more IMAX screens. Sources told Puck that Cruise had also been “complaining loudly to Paramount executives and others about the IMAX situation”.

Steven Spielberg himself hailed Cruise as the man who “saved” cinema. Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick sure did revitalise cinemas as that juggernaut of a film proved that people still wanted to see bold films on the big screen. 

It seems that Cruise isn’t going down without a fight, but it’s hard to see how he could win this fight with Nolan, whose love for IMAX is well-known. 

Oppenheimer has also received an R rating in the US, a first for Nolan since 2002’s Insomnia. This means anyone under 17 needs to be accompanied by an adult. This may not seem like a big deal but compare it to Barbie’s inevitable PG-13 rating. Barbie will be accessible for a lot more people even if Oppenheimer boasts a bigger name behind the camera. 

It would seem that July is going to be an interesting month for the film industry. At best, all films make a killing and everyone wins. Worst case scenario… Well, we don’t want to talk about that.