Does This Early Screening of ‘The Odyssey’ Prove Fans Are Skipping Work to See It?
A tweet from a user named han, posted on X under the handle @heymorewords, has been getting a ton of attention this week, and honestly, it’s easy to see why.
She shared a screenshot of the AMC app showing the seating chart for a 7 AM showing of ‘The Odyssey‘ at AMC Lincoln Square 13 in New York, and the entire theater is completely sold out. Not partially full. Not mostly booked. Every single seat is gone for a screening that starts before most people even have their coffee.
Her caption pretty much sums up what a lot of people are thinking. “this is pure unemployment activity because wdym the entire theatre is sold out for a 7 AM showing of the odyssey??” It’s a joke, but it’s also a fair question. Who is out here waking up before sunrise on a Friday to watch a three hour Greek epic, and why are there enough of them to fill an entire IMAX auditorium.
Turns out this isn’t some random fluke either. According to reporting from Variety, demand for ‘The Odyssey’ in IMAX 70mm has turned into a full blown frenzy, and AMC Lincoln Square happens to be one of the hottest tickets in the country for it. People are apparently crossing state lines, buying dozens of tickets across multiple weeks, and yes, waking up at absurd hours just to catch the film in the format Christopher Nolan actually shot it in.
One fan named Simon James told Variety he’s bought eighteen tickets to see the movie at that exact theater over the film’s first three weeks in release. Eighteen. Another guy is flying from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles just to see it in 70mm because his hometown doesn’t have the right kind of screen. So a 7 AM sellout in New York starts to make a little more sense once you realize the scale of what’s actually happening here.
Part of the reason this specific theater is so packed is that IMAX 70mm film projection is genuinely rare. Not every IMAX screen can even show a movie this way, so the pool of theaters capable of doing it is small, and Lincoln Square is one of the biggest and most well-known ones on the East Coast. When you combine that scarcity with Nolan’s massive following and the fact that this is literally the first movie ever shot entirely on IMAX cameras, you end up with people treating ticket purchases like it’s a concert on sale day.
The Hollywood Reporter actually covered something similar happening even earlier, back when advance tickets for these opening weekend 70mm screenings first went on sale a full year before the movie came out. Within an hour of going live, 95 percent of those seats were already gone, and resale prices on some of them climbed as high as three or $400 for tickets that normally cost around $25.
Would you go to a 7 AM screening of 'The Odyssey'?
So yeah, the 7 AM sellout that sparked all these jokes on X isn’t really that surprising once you look at the bigger picture. It might sound unhinged to see hundreds of people commit to a movie before the sun is even fully up, but for a certain kind of film fan, this has basically turned into a cultural event rather than just a regular Friday release. Would you actually show up for a 7 AM screening of a three-hour movie, or does that sound like a hard pass? Let us know in the comments.
