ABSTRACT
On July 8, 2014, J.J. Abrams’s production company, Bad Robot, released a tweet with an image of an IMAX camera suspended over a desert landscape, with the hashtag #bestformatever. 1 At this point in time, the company had released only a few oblique details about the production of The Force Awakens; while it was not immediately clear if they were shooting the film in this format, the image inspired speculation about how the much-anticipated Star Wars film might be enhanced by the experience of IMAX. However, this was not the first intersection of Star Wars and IMAX. In this essay, I will address how IMAX iterations of three Star Wars films draw upon viewers’ transmedia experiences with and nostalgia for the franchise.
