Nothing is going to keep Amber Connaghan, a 29-year-old tech editor who lives in the California desert, from seeing Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” on opening day. Connaghan bought her ticket over a year ago and has been gearing up for the three-hour drive to the closest theater playing the film in Imax 70mm.
“One of my friends got pregnant last year, and she’s like, ‘OK, it’s time for you to have your second child,’” says Connaghan. “I was like, ‘No, I have to wait a few months. Otherwise, it’s going to be too close to ‘The Odyssey.’”
Connaghan isn’t the only movie fan who is going to extremes to watch Odysseus’ perilous return to Ithaca in the biggest, most pristine format available. Nolan’s decision to film Homer’s epic entirely with Imax cameras — the first film to do so — has set off a mad dash for tickets to Imax screenings in general and a near frenzy for those select showings in Imax 70mm. Because many Imax auditoriums don’t have the capacity to showcase movies in 70mm, people are crossing state lines, snapping up tickets to multiple showtimes months in advance or even settling for 2 a.m. screenings of the nearly three-hour epic just so they can be part of the moviegoing phenomenon.
“This is the biggest movie of the year from the biggest director of our lifetime,” says Hogan Shay, a 27-year-old Dallas-based software advisor who plans to see the film in Imax 70mm twice in two weeks. “We grew up with Nolan’s work. He’s a household name for my generation like Spielberg or Scorsese were for my parents.”
Few can match the commute of Tim McHugh. The 33-year-old healthcare consultant is flying from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles in order to see “The Odyssey” in Imax 70mm at Universal City Walk. McHugh and his brother often take a vacation to visit different ballparks in America, but their home city doesn’t have many Imax screens, so they decided to take a cinematic detour on their next trip.
“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,’” McHugh says.
In high school, McHugh worked the projector at a local cinema, which gave him an appreciation for the massive canisters that are necessary for carrying the reels of Imax 70mm film.
“So much of my after-school life was spent lacing projectors that I fell in love with movies,” McHugh says. “You feel connected to the medium when you’re putting your hands on film like that.”
Getting into an opening weekend screening can be an ordeal almost worthy of Odysseus. Universal, the distributor of “The Odyssey,” made the unprecedented move of putting Imax tickets to “The Odyssey” on sale a year in advance and saw most screenings sell out in hours. The studio made a second tranche of tickets available in June, but fans had to deal with hours-long waits and crashed sites as they tried to land a seat.
“It was harrowing,” says Conrad Rothbaum, a 35-year-old filmmaker in Los Angeles. “I was on a text chain with friends, and we were all trying to get tickets at the same time. We’re just refreshing and refreshing and the site keeps crashing. Finally, two of my friends texted me that they were done. And when I saw those texts, I thought, ‘Now is the time to log back in because all the reasonable people have given up,’ and I got my ticket.”
Others didn’t wait for the tech to come back online. Spencer Frey, a 27-year-old recruiting consultant from Hoboken, New Jersey, was working in New York City when tickets to “The Odyssey” went on sale in June. Because the AMC Theatres ticket site kept crashing, Frey walked to the chain’s Lincoln Square location during his lunch break to reserve a seat in-person.
“It was pandemonium in there,” Frey says. “I’ve never seen so many people packed into the lobby on a weekday, all trying to use a kiosk.”
“The Odyssey” is expected to dominate the box office this weekend, and its commercial success is a testament to Nolan’s popularity. Over the past two decades, he has become Hollywood’s most consistent hitmaker, directing the likes of “The Dark Knight,” “Dunkirk” and “Oppenheimer.” And Nolan has used nearly every one of his film’s promotional campaigns to advocate for the cinematic experience and the virtues of Imax’s vast screens. For many moviegoers, Nolan has become synonymous with blockbuster entertainment.
“I’m in awe of the technical aspects of his films — the cinematography and the sound and the largeness of everything,” says Daniel Patchen, a 21-year-old media studies student at Northeastern University who will see “The Odyssey” in Imax at a Providence, Rhode Island multiplex. “So many of his movies are like puzzles. That just makes you want to rewatch them multiple times.”
Some die-hard Nolan fans won’t just be there on the first weekend for “The Odyssey.” They plan to spend much of July watching Odysseus sack Troy. Simon James, a 33-year-old attorney in New York City, has bought 18 tickets to Imax 70mm screenings of “The Odyssey” at AMC Lincoln Square over the film’s first three weeks of release.
“Chris Nolan is my favorite director, and I am a big appreciator of his films,” Simon says. “I really believe him when he says that the best way to see a Chris Nolan film is in an Imax theater. The experience of his films is exponentially elevated by viewing it in the right conditions.”
Many ticket buyers are also drawn to watching “The Odyssey” in Imax 70mm because they see it as the next big cultural happening.
“There’s a little bit of FOMO,” says Connaghan. “I want to see what someone like Nolan can do with something as epic and spectacular as ‘The Odyssey.’ As soon as the tickets went on sale a year ago, I knew this was going to be something pretty special. I knew it was something I didn’t want to miss.”