First tickets to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey sell out – a year before its 2026 release

The Guardian

3 days ago

The first tickets to Christopher Nolan's take on Homer's Odyssey have gone on sale – before he's even finished filming it and a year before the film is even out, in what is likely the longest pre-sale in cinematic history.
The Odyssey, which stars Matt Damon as the cunning Odysseus as he fights his way home after the end of the Trojan war, will be released on 17 July 2026. But on Thursday, Imax released tickets to the first screenings at the 26 Imax cinemas around the world that have the staff and equipment required to project in 1570 format.
1570 is the largest and highest resolution film format in existence and Nolan's preferred format. It refers to the dimensions of the film: the 15 perforations along the edge of each frame, which allow the film to be pulled through the projector, and 70mm in height.
The first Imax tickets are just for 1570 format screenings on the opening weekend, from 16 to 19 July 2026 – but only one screening per cinema per day is possible as the film's length is unknown.
Overnight, Imax Melbourne sold about 1,800 tickets across four screenings.
'Just one year in advance – it's nice and normal to have a pre-sale like that,' Jeremy Fee, general manager of Imax Melbourne, joked to Guardian Australia on Friday. 'I couldn't be more excited. We worship Nolan here. It's a bit pathetic. But we love him so much.'
In the US, almost all tickets sold out within an hour ; soon there were reports of tickets being resold online by scalpers for between US$300-$400. In the UK, London's famous BFI Imax has sold out, as has the Science Museum Imax.
Nolan began using Imax cameras for 2008's The Dark Knight and has championed the format ever since. His 2023 Oscar winner Oppenheimer was the first movie shot entirely with Imax 65mm film, but The Odyssey will be the first commercial feature shot entirely on Imax film cameras, after Nolan convinced Imax to create new cameras that were quiet enough for him to record dialogue.
Imax screenings accounted for US$190m – or about 20% – of Oppenheimer's US$975.8m global box office. The Oppenheimer 1570 reel was more than 18km long, weighed 260kg and was the most expensive film reel ever made. The platters that hold and feed the large-format film reels through the Imax projectors had to be widened to 1.85 metres to accommodate the sheer heft of Oppenheimer – but Fee predicted the Odyssey reel could be even bigger.
The longest pre-sale Imax Melbourne has ever run was about three months, Fee said.
'Nolan is the biggest deal for us, obviously,' he says. 'But we've not been through something like this before. We had to change the back-end of our ticketing systems to ensure we could actually put tickets on sale this far out. It is definitely an anomaly for us, and something we were pretty excited to do.'
The decision to sell a relatively small number of tickets so far in advance when Nolan's film will inevitably dominate screens in most cinemas upon release, Fee said, is simply to build anticipation.
'We're anticipating it will be even more successful for us than Oppenheimer was – and Oppenheimer is our most successful feature length of all time,' he added. 'It is an opportunity to see the film in the way that Nolan wants it to be seen. The superfans for Nolan – and there's many of them – are just getting excited about being able to access [The Odyssey] earlier than anyone else.'
Imax Melbourne regularly sees 'cinema tourists', he said: people who book holidays around screenings.
'We've already got people who bought their Odyssey tickets and are now trying to find flights from Sydney and New Zealand and so on, just to come down here,' he said.
According to Fee, Imax Melbourne had not yet seen any evidence of scalpers selling tickets from their first four screenings. But the pre-sale is 'just a drop in the ocean, really, of how many sessions and tickets will eventually be put on sale,' he said. 'The idea of buying a tout ticket now would be a very foolish one.'