Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opened presales for IMAX and premium large format screenings on Thursday at noon Eastern time, and within 30 minutes the AMC app had paused ticket sales entirely.
Fandango's site slowed to a crawl. Regal experienced similar issues. Wait times on AMC hit one hour for customers who managed to get into the queue rather than being sent to the "line is paused" holding screen.
On the secondary market, IMAX 70mm tickets for opening weekend in New York and Florida were already listed for between $500 and $1,000 before the sun went down Thursday.
The film opens July 17. The presale launched because AMC has not fully recovered before NBC News covered the chaos on Friday morning.
The social media response was the specific kind of exasperated humor that a ticket-buying disaster produces. "So Christopher Nolan is the Taylor Swift of movie tickets now?!?" one user wrote on X.
Another said, "No bc why are odyssey tickets harder to get than Coachella tickets." A third, who spent two hours attempting to secure IMAX 70mm seats through AMC, documented the experience with the specific fury of someone who knows their time was wasted by a technology failure that should not have surprised anyone: "amc should be ashamed by today. I spent almost 2 hours trying to book tickets for imax 70mm tickets for the odyssey but every time I reached the select ticket stage, the site would never let me progress and constant hit me with 'an error occurred.'"
Rolling Stone described the situation accurately, securing tickets to The Odyssey turned into its own arduous journey.
The Film Behind The Hype
The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic poem, the story of Odysseus, the Greek king of Ithaca, whose journey home from the Trojan War lasted ten years and took him through encounters with gods, monsters, magic and mortality that have defined Western literature for nearly three thousand years.
Nolan wrote the screenplay and directed. Universal Pictures is distributing. The production budget is $250 million.
The film is the first feature ever shot entirely on IMAX cameras, not partially, not with IMAX cameras for select sequences as Nolan has done with his previous films, but entirely, from first shot to last. Nolan described his ambition in a recent interview with 60 Minutes with the directness that characterizes how he talks about his work. "I'm trying to put the audience into that horse. I'm trying to put them on the deck of Odysseus' ship."
The IMAX cameras that shot every frame of the film are the instrument of that ambition — the technology that, in Nolan's hands, has been the consistent argument that seeing his films on the largest screen available is qualitatively different from any other way of seeing them.
Matt Damon plays Odysseus, the wandering king, the cunning hero, the husband trying to get home. Damon described what working with Nolan on the full-IMAX project felt like from inside it. "What separates him from other directors is the stories he wants to tell are incredibly ambitious and the way he wants to tell them is incredibly ambitious. In this case, he wanted to do it 100 percent in IMAX, which had never been done."
The Cast That Explains The Demand
The cast assembled for The Odyssey is the most impressive ensemble Nolan has ever assembled for a single production, which is a meaningful statement given that Oppenheimer starred Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie and dozens of others.
The Odyssey's Fandango listing confirms the roles: Matt Damon as Odysseus, Tom Holland as Telemachus, the son who has been searching for his father, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, the wife who has waited twenty years, Robert Pattinson as Antinous, the suitor who most aggressively pursues Penelope and most directly threatens everything Odysseus has left behind, Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy/Clytemnestra, Zendaya as Athena, the goddess who has protected and guided Odysseus throughout his journey, Charlize Theron as Calypso, the nymph who detained Odysseus on her island for seven years, Mia Goth, Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, Ben Safdie as Agamemnon, John Leguizamo, Elliot Page and a supporting cast that extends well beyond that list.
The specific casting choices communicate something about Nolan's approach to the material. Pattinson as Antinous, the suitor, is a character designed to be despised, and Pattinson has been doing quietly transgressive supporting work alongside his blockbuster career ever since The Batman.
Zendaya as Athena places one of the most popular performers of her generation in the role of the divine protector, a choice that gives Athena's scenes a specific kind of contemporary cultural weight. Lupita Nyong'o playing dual roles as both Helen and Clytemnestra, the woman whose face launched a thousand ships and the queen who murdered her husband upon his return, is the kind of casting that announces the film is engaging with the mythological material rather than just illustrating it.
Why Is IMAX 70MM Such A Big Deal For The Odyssey?
The specific format driving Thursday's ticket chaos is IMAX 70mm, the highest fidelity version of the film Nolan has made for audiences who want the maximum possible version of the theatrical experience. IMAX 70mm is not the same as regular IMAX.
The 70mm designation refers to the film gauge, the physical width of the celluloid, which produces images with a level of resolution and texture that digital IMAX projection cannot fully replicate.
There are approximately 30 IMAX 70mm-capable theaters in the United States. Each of them has a finite number of seats.
When The Odyssey's IMAX 70mm opening weekend tickets were made available last summer, almost a year before the July 17 release, they sold out almost immediately. That sellout was itself unprecedented.
Films do not typically offer opening weekend tickets a year in advance. Nolan's last film did, because the community of Nolan fans who travel across state lines to see his work in the best available format had demonstrated that there was demand for those seats at extraordinary lead times.
The fans who traveled across state lines to see Oppenheimer in IMAX 70mm are the same fans who were in AMC's queue Thursday morning trying to secure seats to The Odyssey in the same format. Many of them spent two hours in that queue and got nothing.
The secondary market listings of $500 to $1,000 per ticket represent the equilibrium price for seats that should have been available through the primary market but that the primary market's infrastructure could not handle distributing.
Nolan After Oppenheimer
The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan's first film since Oppenheimer. That context is the proximate explanation for everything that happened Thursday.
Oppenheimer won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It earned approximately $952 million worldwide.
It reinvigorated the argument, which Nolan has been making for 20 years with Memento and The Dark Knight and Inception and Interstellar and Dunkirk and Tenet, that theatrical cinema is irreplaceable, that the experience of seeing a large-format film in a well-maintained theater is categorically different from watching it on a screen at home.
Every major film release now exists in the shadow of whether audiences will treat it as a theatrical event or a streaming event. Nolan's films are always theatrical events.
The Odyssey carries $250 million in production budget and the premise of a Greek epic shot entirely on IMAX cameras and a cast that represents the current peak of Hollywood's star system.
The audience waiting for it, the audience that crashed AMC and Fandango on Thursday, has been waiting since Oppenheimer's credits rolled.
July 17 is six weeks away. The regular screenings still have seats. The IMAX 70mm seats are on StubHub.
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