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London’s BFI Imax cinema — the biggest Imax screen in the U.K. — is experiencing its very own Odyssey.
On Friday, due to unprecedented demand to see Chris Nolan’s already record-breaking “The Odyssey,” on Imax 70mm,
as the director intended, the BFI Imax released another batch of tickets.
However, seemingly only those with the gods on their side got lucky. Within minutes of going on sale at 2 p.m. local time, there were reports of them having already sold out, with stories appearing online about “40,000 people” being in a virtual queue. The BFI later told Variety that all tickets had gone “in under 30 minutes.”
“Odysseus waited 10 years to get home. These fans are about to wait longer just to sit down,” wrote one social media user.
The latest sell-out of tickets comes just weeks after “The Odyssey” became the BFI Imax’s biggest opening weekend of all time, taking £219,867 ($300,000) over three days and topping “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”
The film also broke the theater’s single-day pre-sale record, selling 28,000 tickets in 24 hours a full year in advance, amounting to a £750,000 ($1 million) in gross revenue. That surpassed the pre-sale record for “Dune: Part Two” and “Oppenheimer,” which took £366,000 and £254,000 respectively in their first 24 hours on sale.
But one cinema in London offers just a snapshot of the global phenomenon that “The Odyssey” has become, with the film recently surpassing $700 million to become the fourth highest-grossing movie of the year after just 12 days in theaters.
For a short period, it did seem that the U.K. did have one over the U.S., where there were numerous complaints about AMC’s website crashing after new tickets went on sale. However, it would soon emerge on Friday that the BFI’s website, much like Odysseus’s plans to make it back home from Troy to see his wife Penelope in decent time, had also crashed.
