We already lived through the Streaming Wars. Studios rushed to launch platforms, lock down IP, and fight for dominance in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. Whether those wars are actually over is still up for debate, and honestly I may need to get back to you on that one, especially with recent industry speculation about a potential Warner Bros. and Netflix merger.

But right now, a different battle is taking shape. And this one is happening in theaters.

Welcome to the IMAX Wars.

This conversation started, like most film discourse does now, in a group chat. My friend Lyss (@lyssreport) dropped a screenshot showing a post on X suggesting that Avengers: Doomsday may not receive IMAX screens during its initial release window because Dune: Part Three is expected to hold an exclusive IMAX run. That quickly turned into frustration about Spider-Man potentially losing IMAX slots as The Odyssey is also projected to dominate premium screens.

To be clear, much of this is still based on industry reporting and scheduling projections, not final theater announcements. But the anxiety around it is real, and it points to a larger issue that is not going away.

There are only so many IMAX screens. And suddenly, too many massive films want them at the same time.

This might be a hot take, and I know not everyone will agree with me, but I am firmly in the camp that Dune and The Odyssey deserve those IMAX slots more.

Not because superhero movies are bad. Not because they are not fun, successful, or culturally dominant. But because IMAX, as a format, was built for a specific kind of cinematic storytelling, and epics rely on it in a way superhero films generally do not.

IMAX is about scale. Not just a bigger screen or louder sound, but the feeling of being small inside something vast. That feeling is the entire point of Dune. The desert is not just scenery. It is power, danger, religion, economy, and survival all at once. You are supposed to feel overwhelmed by the environment and the forces pressing down on the characters. When that scale is flattened, part of what the story is trying to communicate is flattened with it.

The same logic applies to The Odyssey. It is an epic in the most literal sense. Gods, monsters, fate, long journeys, and humans being pushed around by forces far greater than themselves. These stories are meant to feel enormous. IMAX is not a luxury add-on for them. It is part of the language they are using to tell the story.

Superhero movies operate differently. They are spectacle-driven and character-focused, and they are designed to work across formats. Spider-Man swinging through a city is fun in IMAX, but it still works perfectly well on a standard screen. The emotional beats land. The action still hits. The story remains intact. IMAX enhances those films, but it does not complete them.

That distinction matters, especially now that IMAX has become a limited and highly contested resource. IMAX is no longer just a premium viewing option. It is strategic real estate. Studios are negotiating exclusivity windows, adjusting release calendars, and making decisions that force audiences to feel like one film is being chosen over another.

At one point in the group chat, someone joked that Dune is “just sand” and that sand doesn’t need IMAX, which honestly made me laugh because the film really does have a lot of sand. But that’s actually why I think it needs IMAX. When so much of the story lives in the environment, the scale becomes part of how the film works.

I know not everyone will agree with this. Superhero fans are understandably protective of their IMAX experiences, especially when these films are positioned as major cultural events. That frustration makes sense. But if we are talking about what the format is actually meant to serve, epics like Dune and The Odyssey are not taking IMAX space away from superhero films.

They are using IMAX the way it was intended.

We survived the Streaming Wars. Now we are watching the IMAX Wars unfold in real time. The difference is that this battle has a hard limit.

There are only so many screens.

And that is what makes this fight inevitable.