A viewer who spent two weeks chasing tickets for The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm finally got into the BFI IMAX near Waterloo in London this week. What was billed as a screening of The Odyssey turned into a short double feature before the film even began, with a few minutes of IMAX 70mm preview footage from Dune: Part Three.
That kind of demand helps explain why The Odyssey box office has become part of the conversation around the film’s presentation as much as its story. The wait was not just a matter of patience; it required repeated refreshes and a string of false starts before the booking came through, a reminder that IMAX 70mm has become the ticket people are trying hardest to get.
The preview itself was designed to land hard. It opened with Denis Villeneuve saying thank you to Christopher Nolan, then cut to Stilgar leading an assault on a rain-drenched planet. The imagery echoed the D-Day landings in Saving Private Ryan, with landing vehicles meeting machine-gun fire and resistance, and it was shown in a format that made the scale feel like part of the event rather than a trailer before one.
That made the surprise more striking because the viewer had gone in expecting only The Odyssey. Instead, the night started with another Villeneuve project before moving on to The Odyssey itself, which included scenes of Calypso and the destruction of Troy. The night-time destruction scenes were described as meeting the same brief for darkness and contrast, and the film’s soundscape was said to be the sort of thing that would test a soundbar and surround setup at home, even if it was clearly built for a cinema far beyond that.
The odd fit between the two films is part of what gives the evening its weight. The preview borrowed the biggest possible format to sell a film that is still far away, while The Odyssey used the same format to justify the wait that had stretched across two weeks of refreshes and false starts. The result was less a standard screening than a demonstration of how scarce IMAX 70mm has become and how the format itself now functions as an attraction.
That scarcity also points to the unanswered question at the center of The Odyssey box office buzz: not whether people want to see it, but how long they are willing to keep hunting for a seat in the format that seems to matter most. For this viewer, the answer was two weeks and a surprise preview; for everyone else, it is whether another booking can be found before the year is out.
