‘The Odyssey’ Is Sold Out Through August — and Theaters Fear an IMAX Trap

Deep in the Palms Resort off the Las Vegas Strip — past the casino, across from the sportsbook — Robert Lytle and his team pushed their chips in.

Three months before Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened, IMAX contacted Brenden Theatres, whose 14-screen Las Vegas location includes an IMAX, with the hope of providing Brenden with a 70mm print of the film. Brenden’s leadership agreed to take the print, but explained that they would need significant technical support with projection equipment that hadn’t been used since 2014.

“We actually hadn’t played anything in 70mm since Interstellar, another Nolan movie,” says Lytle, Brenden’s chief operating officer. The exhibitor needed IMAX’s help securing parts and revamping old gear.

So began a 48-day sprint in which IMAX technicians came out to assist the theater in refurbishing the projection booth, successfully getting the antiquated system back up and running.

When tickets initially went on sale for standard 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. showtimes, they sold out instantly. Moviegoers began flying in from Los Angeles and elsewhere to catch Nevada’s only IMAX 70mm presentation — available at just 41 theaters in the world, 25 of them in the U.S. To meet the frenzy, Brenden expanded to a grueling 8 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. schedule, turning over the three-hour epic six times a day — at $51.75 a ticket, nearly $24 more than the national average for an IMAX 70mm screening.

Now, Odyssey screenings in Brenden’s IMAX 70mm auditorium are sold out through late August, though they plan to scale back to four showings a day starting Aug. 14. They’re not alone, as you likely are already aware. In Fort Lauderdale, the AutoNation IMAX has sold out through mid-August, drawing visitors from as far as Atlanta and Puerto Rico. In New York and Los Angeles, tickets are gone through Aug. 19, and London is booked through Sept. 10.

Which brings us to this weekend’s big opening. Spider-Man: Brand New Day won’t play on a single IMAX screen in North America — Nolan still has them all — yet the film is still expected to sling its way past $200 million domestically in its opening frame, if not $300 million. (It will play in Dolby, 4DX and other non-IMAX PLFs.)

That’s the tension underneath exhibition’s best story in years. Premium large format is the fastest-growing slice of the box office and IMAX is the most powerful brand in the theater business — powerful enough to hand its entire North American footprint to a three-hour Homer adaptation. But a growing number of exhibitors are worried that the industry has spent this summer teaching audiences a lesson it can’t take back: that a regular screen isn’t worth leaving the house for.

Today I break down the problems hiding inside Hollywood’s premium-screen success:

• What the premium-format boom’s biggest numbers really measure — and why demand is only part of the story
• What the extra cost of a premium ticket is actually buying
• How Nolan taught audiences to care about format — and which filmmakers are following him
• Why exhibitors fear Hollywood is turning ordinary screens into a second-class experience
• What Spider-Man’s opening without a single North American IMAX screen will test
• What the industry accidentally may have taught moviegoers this summer about their own behavior