Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Shatters BFI IMAX Records With a Million-Dollar First Day Before It Even Opens

Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ is already rewriting the record books, and it hasn’t screened a single public frame yet. The upcoming mythic epic has broken first-day sales records at London’s BFI IMAX, selling 28,000 tickets in just 24 hours for a total gross of £750,000, roughly $1 million, the highest ever recorded at the venue for any film.

The numbers put every previous benchmark to shame. The previous record had been held by ‘Dune: Part Two,’ which generated £366,000 in its first 24 hours on sale, while Nolan’s own ‘Oppenheimer’ took £254,000 in the same window, meaning ‘The Odyssey’ has more than doubled one record and nearly quadrupled the other. That kind of leap isn’t incremental, it’s seismic.

The surge followed four opening weekend screenings selling out in under an hour, including a special midnight showing set to kick off a weekend of round-the-clock screenings at the venue. Demand has been just as intense on the other side of the Atlantic, where the film recorded the highest first-day advance PLF ticket sales at AMC in four years, with wait times on the AMC website stretching as long as an hour during peak demand.

Part of what is driving that frenzy is the sheer scale of what Nolan has put together. ‘The Odyssey’ adapts Homer’s ancient Greek epic and follows Matt Damon as Odysseus on his long and perilous journey home after the Trojan War, with an ensemble cast that includes Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o and Charlize Theron. That cast alone would be enough to generate headlines, but the production itself is what has the film world talking.

‘The Odyssey’ marks the first time a feature film has ever been shot entirely on IMAX 70mm using IMAX cameras, underscoring Nolan’s ongoing commitment to the format and cinematic innovation. Speaking at CinemaCon, Nolan described the ambition behind the format choice, saying, “As a boy, all I wanted to do was tell large-scale stories using that technology, putting the audience into the world.” Filming took place across Greece, Morocco, Italy, Iceland and Scotland.

The secondary market has been even more telling. Tickets have been resold for as high as $1,000, with scalpers flooding platforms before the film has screened a single public showing. It is a telling measure of where audience appetite currently sits, and how rare it has become for a theatrical release to command this level of pre-release urgency.

‘The Odyssey’ is set to premiere in London on July 6, ahead of a wide theatrical release by Universal Pictures on July 17 in the United States and the United Kingdom. If presale momentum is any indication, the story of Odysseus’s long journey home may be about to become one of the defining cinema events of the decade.

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