India, Oct. 17 -- Turns out, we've been watching movies wrong. All these years, we've been sitting in the dark, eating popcorn, having a good time, oblivious to the fact that we might be missing half the movie. We discovered that this July, when side-by-side stills from The Odyssey on a regular screen and in 70mm IMAX revealed that most of us were watching just the tip of Nolan's cinematic iceberg. In the mass-released version, heads were lopped off, skies were missing, and the FOMO was real. India doesn't have a single 70mm IMAX screen to watch the movie The Way Christopher Nolan Intended. There are less than 45 IMAX 70mm screens in the world, 25 of them in the US. He deliberately made a movie that the majority of viewers couldn't watch properly anyway. With epic sagas such as Oppenheimer (2023), Dune: Part 1 (2021), Part 2 (2024), the soon-to-be-released Part 3 (2026) and The Odyssey (2026), booking the right screen has never been more important. We're not just debating the storylines and the performances. The format we watch the movies in is suddenly also part of the conversation. We're comparing screens, projectors, aspect ratios, sound systems and film stock. Even IMAX digital comes with homework: Check the aspect ratio, make sure it's 4K, find out what projectors the cinema uses. Booking a movie ticket requires more research than buying a laptop. It's all part of the PR machine. If the goal is to get people back into cinemas, studios are making the viewing experience sound exclusive and technically superior. According to IMAX's own research, simply knowing that a film had an IMAX theatrical release made 62% of respondents more likely to watch it at home, because they assumed it had higher production quality. Around 70% said seeing the IMAX logo on a poster made a film seem superior, while 90% saw "Filmed for IMAX" as an even stronger endorsement. Many were also willing to pay an extra $3 for a premium screen. The phenomenon has reached TV too. When the Battle of Winterfell left everyone squinting cluelessly at the screen during the final season of Game of Thrones, cinematographer Fabien Wagner blamed viewers for not knowing how to tune their televisions properly, or for being dumb enough to watch the "cinematic" show on their iPads. For those who are re-watching Friends - originally shot in 4:3 for the boxy TVs of the time - on wide-screen HD TVs how, there are boom mics, stage lights and the edges of set walls in the frame. How to find the "right" format when it doesn't exist today? Cinematographer Kaushal Shah, whose credits include An Action Hero (2022) and Gehraiyaan (2022), believes IMAX can add to a film's visual spectacle, but it isn't a prerequisite for enjoying it. "It works best for films like The Odyssey, where the scale of the story and the way it is presented on screen go hand in hand. If a film isn't shot on that scale, watching it on IMAX may not make much of a difference." And the crop rarely makes an impact on general storytelling. "A good film remains a good film, regardless of the aspect ratio you watch it in. You're still seeing the core of the story - the actors, the performances and the action." Meanwhile, consider the Mile-High Cry phenomenon: The increased tendency for fliers to get weepy while watching films in an airplane. Researchers have explored how cabin conditions, fatigue and the strange intimacy of watching a story unfold in your own little screen bubble can potentially make us more involved in a movie, more susceptible to tears. No IMAX or giant screens there. So go on. Watch that movie on your laptop, with a bucket of popcorn, subtitles on and your phone within reach. Cry if you want to. Pause for a bathroom break. Watch it on a screen that doesn't require breaking the bank. You're not doing it wrong. You're just watching a movie....