BFI Imax sold 28,000 tickets for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in the first 24 hours of on sale, bringing in £750,000 and setting a new benchmark at the venue. Four opening weekend screenings were gone in under an hour a year before release, including a midnight showing that disappeared as fast as the others.
The demand lands now because The Odyssey is still months from opening on July 17th, yet the first wave of sales has already outpaced the venue’s previous high-water marks. For readers searching Spiderman tickets, the draw is not a comic-book crossover but the scale of the sellout: this is a single screen moving like an event in its own right.
The performance is stronger than BFI Imax’s first-day totals for Dune: Part Two and Oppenheimer, which brought in £366,000 and £254,000 in the same 24-hour window. That gap matters because it shows just how hard the early demand hit before the film has even arrived, though the numbers do not separate whether the leap came from higher prices, more urgency, or the simple fact that a handful of premium screenings were all that was available.
That uncertainty sits alongside the film’s selling points. The Odyssey is described as the first feature shot entirely on Imax 70mm with Imax cameras, and it follows Odysseus, King of Ithaca, on his journey home after the Trojan war. The cast includes Matt Damon, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong’o and Charlize Theron, a lineup built to travel well beyond the usual opening-night crowd.
BFI Imax, the UK’s largest screen, has already shown what Nolan can do there. In 2023 it reported the biggest opening weekend box office result of any screen in the UK for Oppenheimer, taking £207,677 in that first weekend before the run reached £2.2M overall. The new figures suggest The Odyssey has the same kind of pull, only faster and with less patience from buyers.
What the early sellout really shows is that the opening weekend is already rationed. Four screenings were gone within an hour because there were only four to take, and the midnight showing was part of that same rush. By July 17th, the question will not be whether BFI Imax can fill The Odyssey; it is how many more people will be left trying to get in.
