Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Is Blowing Away ‘Oppenheimer’ Before It Even Hits Theaters
Christopher Nolan has spent decades building the kind of audience loyalty that turns a simple ticket purchase into an event. From ‘The Dark Knight’ to ‘Inception’ to ‘Interstellar’, his name alone has been enough to transform a summer release into a cultural moment, pulling audiences out of their homes and into virtual queues for hours at a time. That devotion has only intensified heading into his latest project.
When Premium Large Format tickets for ‘The Odyssey’ went live on June 4, the response was immediate and overwhelming, with the AMC app pausing sales within thirty minutes while Fandango and Regal both buckled under the traffic. Part of the frenzy comes down to the format itself. ‘The Odyssey’ is the first commercial feature ever shot entirely on IMAX film cameras in the 1570 format, and with only 24 theaters in the United States equipped to screen it in IMAX 70mm, supply simply cannot keep up with demand.
That imbalance is now showing up in the numbers. According to the account Kalshi Film, which cited data from @Itsjat32, ‘The Odyssey’ has already sold 150,000 tickets in initial presales for its domestic opening weekend, more than double the 65,000 tickets ‘Oppenheimer’ had sold at a comparable point in its own release cycle. Industry tracking reports back up that figure, noting the film has moved roughly 150,000 tickets through its early premium format presales alone, a staggering gap for a film that won Best Picture and earned close to a billion dollars worldwide.
The scale of the sales run is even more striking considering only PLF screenings were available during that initial rollout, with standard showtimes not yet on sale, and the film still managed to outpace the first-day presale totals of every major studio release at AMC since 2022. In fact, the only theatrical events to post higher single-day advance sales at AMC in that stretch belong to concert films from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.
The demand has pushed resale prices into eye-watering territory. Tickets from the original July 2025 drop were already flipping on eBay for over 100 dollars, and the June presale pushed some resale listings as high as 1,000 dollars. Overseas, the reaction has been just as intense, with premium IMAX bookings in India selling out almost instantly once tickets opened.
Which film do you think will gross more?
Nolan has assembled a cast built for this kind of spectacle. Matt Damon leads as Odysseus on his grueling decade long journey home from the Trojan War, facing mythical threats including the cyclops Polyphemus, while Charlize Theron plays the sorceress Calypso. The ensemble also includes Tom Holland as Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and Robert Pattinson as Antinous.
Box office trackers had projected an opening weekend in the 65 to 80 million dollar range before the June presale chaos, and those numbers may climb considerably once general showtimes open to the public. ‘The Odyssey’ sails into theaters everywhere on July 17. With Nolan once again turning a movie ticket into the hottest item of the summer, is ‘The Odyssey’ shaping up to be the director’s biggest opening yet, or are these presale numbers destined to cool once the full slate of showtimes finally goes live.
