BFI Imax sold 28,000 tickets for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in the first 24 hours of on‑sale, grossing £750,000 — a new first‑day record for the London venue.
The figure dwarfs previous first‑day takings at the same screen: Dune: Part Two collected £366,000 in its opening 24 hours at BFI Imax, and Oppenheimer took £254,000. Four opening‑weekend screenings for The Odyssey had already sold out in under an hour a year in advance, including a special midnight showing that will usher in a weekend of round‑the‑clock screenings.
Those numbers matter because BFI Imax is the UK’s largest screen and a bellwether for premium‑format demand in Britain. The venue, owned and operated by the British Film Institute in central London, was the top Imax screen in the UK for Oppenheimer in 2023 and the second‑highest grossing Imax site worldwide on that weekend.
Demand for Nolan’s film is not limited to London. When premium‑format tickets for The Odyssey went on sale in the U.S. a year in advance, they generated roughly 150,000 tickets and about $3.4 million in 24 hours; U.S. ticketing websites crashed and wait times topped an hour. Resale listings on auction sites showed some tickets offered for as much as $1,500.
Part of the pull is technical and cast‑driven: The Odyssey is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm with IMAX cameras, and the billing includes Matt Damon, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong’o and Charlize Theron. Those elements helped produce the rapid sellouts at BFI Imax and the unusually large first‑day gross for a single venue.
The immediate consequence is simple and inconvenient for would‑be buyers: screenings at the London venue disappeared quickly, and many moviegoers who logged on to buy tickets found seats gone within minutes. For readers hunting spiderman tickets or any premium‑format release, the speed of these sales is a reminder that blockbusters can fill out high‑end auditoriums in a single day.
Despite the record, a key friction remains — The Odyssey does not open until July 17. BFI Imax has not announced whether it will add extra screenings between now and the release date, and the available information does not indicate additional allocations. That gap is the story’s immediate next act: pressure from unprecedented early sales makes added shows likely, but there is no confirmed schedule change to ease the shortage.
If you want a seat, the sensible move is to monitor BFI Imax’s official booking channels and set alerts; the venue’s early‑sales performance suggests any new blocks of tickets would also move fast. For now, the takeaway is clear: Nolan’s The Odyssey has bent the market for premium tickets at BFI Imax, and until the venue expands its schedule — if it does — many London viewers will be priced out or forced to watch elsewhere when the film opens on July 17.
