‘The Odyssey’ Starts Breaking Box Office Records Ahead of Its Release

Christopher Nolan has built his reputation on scale, spectacle, and a stubborn devotion to shooting on film rather than digital. Every project he touches tends to arrive wrapped in some kind of technical milestone, and audiences have learned to pay attention when he says a film demands to be seen a certain way.

His latest effort, ‘The Odyssey,’ has taken that reputation and pushed it somewhere new. The Homer adaptation was shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras, making it the first feature film ever to be captured that way from start to finish, and Nolan has been vocal about wanting audiences to experience it on the biggest screens possible.

That demand has now translated into numbers that even seasoned industry watchers are calling unprecedented. London’s BFI IMAX, the largest screen in the United Kingdom, has sold out every single screening of ‘The Odyssey’ for the next two weeks, and it managed that feat before a single member of the general public had actually seen the finished film.

The venue tried to keep pace with demand by adding two extra screenings per day on top of its usual four, including slots at midnight and eight in the morning that would normally be considered unpopular. Those sold out too, despite tickets running between twenty six and thirty pounds and carrying a strict no refund policy.

The scale of the sellout becomes clearer when you look at how quickly it happened. When advanced IMAX 70mm tickets first went on sale in July 2025, a full year ahead of release, the BFI IMAX pulled in around 28,000 ticket sales within 24 hours for roughly 750,000 pounds, smashing the venue’s previous single-day record. That figure more than doubled what ‘Dune: Part Two’ brought in during its own opening day advance sales, and it came in well ahead of the numbers Nolan’s own ‘Oppenheimer’ generated at the same venue.

Four of the opening weekend screenings, including a midnight showing, reportedly sold out in under an hour, a full twelve months before the film ever reached theaters. That kind of early sellout speed is rare even for major blockbusters, let alone a literary adaptation built around a three-thousand-year-old poem.

The frenzy has not stayed confined to London either. Wider IMAX and premium format sales that opened in the United States in June 2026 reportedly pushed platforms like Fandango to their limits, with online wait times stretching to an hour during peak demand. Advance tickets have also started showing up on resale sites for hundreds of dollars, with some listings reportedly climbing toward the four hundred to five hundred dollar range for a single pair.

Part of the appeal clearly comes down to scarcity. There are fewer than forty true 70mm IMAX screens in the entire world, and Nolan built the marketing case for ‘The Odyssey’ almost entirely around the promise that this story could not be properly experienced anywhere else.

That scarcity has been paired with a genuinely massive production behind the scenes. The film reportedly cost around 250 million dollars to make and stars Matt Damon as Odysseus alongside Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, and Charlize Theron, giving it the kind of ensemble firepower that tends to travel well across international markets.

For a project this expensive and this technically demanding, selling out two straight weeks of screenings before reviews even exist is the strongest possible signal that audiences are willing to show up on faith alone. Whether that faith pays off once the wider theatrical run begins on July 17 remains the next big question hanging over the film.

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