David Breashears took an IMAX camera to Everest in the spring of 1996, and his team was on the mountain during the storm of 10 May. They helped with the rescue, went back up and filmed on the summit. The result became the highest-grossing film ever made in the format.
David Breashears took a 70mm IMAX camera to Everest in the spring of 1996, and his team was on the mountain when the storm of 10 May killed eight climbers. Everest, released in IMAX cinemas in March 1998, became the highest-grossing film ever made in the format.
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The camera that reached the summit
No IMAX camera had been to the top of the world before, and getting one there was the point of the expedition. When the storm hit, the team put the filming aside and helped the climbers coming down, Beck Weathers among them. Then they went back up and reached the summit on 23 May, thirteen days later, with the camera. Our staff note says the footage of the Khumbu Icefall and the Lhotse Face is still the best there is, and nearly thirty years on that holds.
The film began as a story about the climb and changed in the edit. The producer Greg MacGillivray said that because so many people had read Into Thin Air, he and Breashears decided to give the disaster more room, and that it made a stronger film. Liam Neeson narrates, and the soundtrack reworks songs by George Harrison in a Tibetan folk style.
1998, 44 minutes, directed by David Breashears. It premiered at the Museum of Science in Boston and took $128 million worldwide, still the record for an IMAX documentary.
Who is in it
The team was led by Breashears and Ed Viesturs. The climbers include Jamling Tenzing Norgay, son of the 1953 summiteer, and Araceli Segarra, who later completed both 7 summits lists. Jamling's own book, Touching My Father's Soul, tells the same season from his side, and Broughton Coburn's Everest: Mountain Without Mercy is the book of the expedition, with the IMAX stills.
David Breashears
Breashears was born in 1955 and died in 2024. In 1985 he became the first American to reach the summit of Everest twice, and that second ascent was the one on which he guided Dick Bass to the top. He went back to the 1996 story in 2008 with Storm Over Everest. Our South Col to the summit chapter covers the ground the film shows.