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Sarah Morrison didn’t want to just watch The Odyssey. She wanted to experience it the way director Christopher Nolan intended: on 70mm film, projected on an IMAX screen.
A self-described film buff, the New York-based content creator has been a fan of Homer’s epic since first reading a children’s adaptation in elementary school. But like many moviegoers in the Big Apple, she found herself competing with thousands of other New Yorkers with the same idea, and was subsequently shut out of showtimes on the official ticketing websites. Undeterred, Morrison resorted to searching secondary markets for any resale tickets, ultimately securing a 2 p.m. screening last Tuesday on eBay.
“I found a listing on eBay for $49. It was stacked against others going for like $400, $500, upwards [of] $3,000,” Morrison told Fortune. ”It was really a steal and [a] hidden gem.” Standard IMAX tickets usually retail for roughly $25 to $35; for a standard showing it’s $10 to $20.
She’s far from alone. Weeks after its release, excitement around the epic’s adaptation is still so great, it’s driving a secondary ticket market. On eBay and other resale platforms, sellers are listing tickets for 70mm screenings well above face value, with one transaction reaching as high as $2,000 for two tickets for a premium showtime in New York. And the secondary markets aren’t limited to just tickets: early attendees of the film capitalized on the fanfare and listed exclusive movie memorabilia, including rare filmstrips that were distributed at select screenings.
The surge underscores a simple dynamic reshaping theatrical economics: extreme supply constraints meeting outsized demand for a differentiated, “must-see” format.
A dwindling IMAX supply chain
Only 34 IMAX theaters in the U.S. and Canada are equipped to carry the 70mm film and most tickets sold out within minutes of release last year, crashing many ticketing websites due to a high volume of traffic. That scarcity has turned tickets into a hot commodity, as resellers capitalize on limited inventory.
“I honestly had no idea really about the frenzy around the ticketing and the demand until I saw it for myself,” Morrison said.
The ticket frenzy underscores a supply chain problem: there simply aren’t enough IMAX theaters available to screen the mammoth-sized 70mm film.
Two weeks since its release in theaters, The Odyssey has raked in over $700 million in the global box office, and is already projected to surpass Nolan’s top grossing films to date: The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. The three-hour film, starring Hollywood heavyweights Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong’o, Zendaya, Tom Holland, and other A-listers, reportedly carried a $250 million production budget, which doesn’t include a steep $125 million in marketing costs, Forbes reports.
The grueling IMAX process
While the film is the first feature-length narrative film to be shot entirely with high-resolution IMAX film cameras, the technology to produce The Odyssey dates back to the 1960s.
“Every shot on those [dialogue-heavy] scenes was an engineering question, because you can’t take a 400-pound camera and stick it above an actor,” Nolan told the New York Times. “I had to find a rhythm between my crew and my actors and myself for suspending the take, reloading the camera, keeping everybody in the zone.”
On an IMAX camera, only two and a half minutes of film can be shot at once, while other cameras allow for up to 11 minutes, Nolan explained to ABC News. The movie took just 91 days to film, but the editing process was grueling: the shoot generated about 2 million feet of film, or about 100 hours of footage that needed to be meticulously cut and repackaged by hand, using a 1940s-era splicing machine only available for large-scale productions in one remaining film lab in Burbank, California.
Film projectors used to screen the film haven’t been produced in decades, and many of the specialized components required to build them are no longer manufactured. According to Variety, IMAX no longer has a complete manufacturing blueprint, and parts needed to build the specialized projectors “simply no longer exist.”
IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond told Bloomberg earlier this month that in order to increase the amount of available IMAX theaters able to show 70mm film, the company had to source vintage machinery from sources worldwide.
“We scoured the world to try and find film projectors,” Gelfond said. “We added [projectors] in 42 theaters, we added shows between midnight and 3:00 a.m. The 6 am’s were sold out! … We were prepared but there’s not more we could have done.”
A 70mm IMAX projector measures at almost six feet tall and over six feet long, requiring a rare xenon lamp, its own pump, and water cooling system, according to Popular Science. In addition, the massive physical film rolls must be shipped to theaters in multiple parts, hand-spliced for several hours, and transported to the projector via forklift.
The sensationalism of modern 70mm
Faced with limited inventory, some fans are embarking on an odyssey of their own just to see the film in 70mm.
One 29-year-old woman told Variety this month that she delayed her pregnancy by two months in order for her labor process to not have a chance of interfering with plans to watch The Odyssey on release day.
Felicia Nara, a PhD student in New York, purchased a train ticket and plans to cross state lines to Rhode Island in early August to see the film. She tried to purchase the ticket two weeks in advance. Late summer, and in a different state, was the best option she could book.
“I didn’t want to pay those crazy resale ticket prices for seats that were pretty mediocre,” she said. “I happened to find one single ticket.”
Given the demand, Universal and IMAX have extended the availability of 70mm screenings into mid-September. The company’s next 70mm format commitment isn’t until December 18, for the debut of Dune: Part Three.
Still, The Odyssey is on track to become IMAX’s “biggest movie of all time” for viewership and revenue, according to Gelfond, and could jumpstart future 70mm projects.
“[The Odyssey] will create more demand,” said Gelfond. “As we look forward to 2027, I think there’ll probably be five or more films released on film.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
