Amber Connaghan bought The Odyssey on Rotten Tomatoes tickets more than a year before opening day, and she was willing to delay having a second child to keep the date open. The 29-year-old in the California desert planned a three-hour drive to the closest Imax 70mm theater.
Universal put Imax tickets to The Odyssey on sale a year in advance, and most Imax screenings sold out in hours. That early rush turned a single premium-format release into a scheduling problem for fans who had to plan around a nearly three-hour epic instead of treating opening night like a normal movie visit.
Amber Connaghan Plans Around Imax 70mm
Last year, Connaghan’s friend suggested she have her second child, and she answered, “OK, it’s time for you to have your second child,” before adding, “No, I have to wait a few months. Otherwise, it’s going to be too close to ‘The Odyssey.’” That is the kind of tradeoff this release has forced: not just early ticket buying, but life planning around a screening window.
Christopher Nolan filmed Homer’s epic entirely with Imax cameras, the first film to do so. In practice, that has concentrated demand into a format many Imax auditoriums cannot show in 70mm, which leaves fewer seats and pushes buyers toward whatever location still has the format.
Dallas, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles
Hogan Shay, a 27-year-old Dallas-based software advisor, said, “This is the biggest movie of the year from the biggest director of our lifetime,” and added, “We grew up with Nolan’s work. He’s a household name for my generation like Spielberg or Scorsese were for my parents.” He planned to see the film in Imax 70mm twice in two weeks.
Tim McHugh, a 33-year-old healthcare consultant, said, “Seeing something in Imax 70mm has been a bucket list item for me since I saw Ryan Coogler do a video about the screenings for ‘Sinners,’” and, “So much of my after-school life was spent lacing projectors that I fell in love with movies.” He was flying from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles for an Imax 70mm screening at Universal City Walk.
June Ticket Rush
After the first on-sale, Universal released a second tranche of tickets in June, and fans still faced hours-long waits and crashed sites. Conrad Rothbaum, a filmmaker in Los Angeles, said, “It was harrowing,” then described a text chain in which friends kept refreshing until the site crashed and he logged back in after others gave up.
Some fans crossed state lines, some accepted 2 a.m. showtimes, and some bought seats months ahead just to secure a screening. The practical play for readers is blunt: if Imax 70mm is the goal, the market has already shown that availability can vanish in hours, not days.
