Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY just earned itself another month in the country’s most exclusive theaters.
Universal Pictures and IMAX Corporation are extending the movie’s rare 70mm engagement through the end of September, Deadline reported Sept. 3 — the third extension since the movie opened July 17.
“We are all witness to history with Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY,” IMAX Corporation CEO Rich Gelfond said in August as the movie’s summer run kept climbing IMAX’s record books. “It is a singular achievement in filmmaking, and its box office trajectory is no less groundbreaking — it continues to defy gravity in a way few films ever have, making it virtually impossible to predict how high it will ultimately soar.”
He wasn’t overselling it. THE ODYSSEY has become IMAX’s best-performing movie ever, pulling in $457 million on IMAX screens worldwide — more than double what AVATAR earned in the format back in 2009. Its 70mm showings alone, the exact format Nolan shot the entire movie on, have brought in $66 million.
THE ODYSSEY, Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic starring Matt Damon as the wandering king Odysseus alongside Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland and Zendaya, has climbed to $1.55 billion worldwide since opening. Nolan shot the entire movie on IMAX cameras, the first feature-length production ever to do so.
That scarcity is really the whole story. Only 25 theaters in the United States, and 16 more worldwide, still own the massive horizontally fed 70mm projectors needed to show THE ODYSSEY the way Nolan intended, Nerdist reported. Most of those machines are pushing 50 years old, and nobody manufactures the parts to build new ones anymore.
Demand hasn’t cared. Showtimes have sold out for weeks at a stretch since opening weekend, pushing some theaters to add 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. screenings just to keep pace, Forbes reported.
The new extension bumps back Sony’s RESIDENT EVIL reboot, which had been set to inherit those same 70mm screens in mid-September, GamesRadar+ reported. THE ODYSSEY will still have to clear out eventually. Denis Villeneuve’s DUNE: PART THREE claims the format in December.
Movieguide® has followed THE ODYSSEY closely since its July release. The site’s own review praised a marriage “worth crossing ten years of ocean for” and Penelope’s steadfast faithfulness through Odysseus’s decade away, while flagging the movie’s pagan imagery, occult content and battlefield violence for an Extreme Caution rating.
That tension is worth sitting with as THE ODYSSEY keeps breaking records most epics never sniff. A movie doesn’t have to get everything right to get something right, and audiences lining up for 2 a.m. showtimes of a three-hour homecoming story suggest Hollywood may have stumbled onto a hunger that runs deeper than spectacle.
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