Christopher Nolan doesn't do anything small—and his upcoming epic The Odyssey just proved it. When tickets for special formats hit sale on Thursday, AMC, Fandango, and Regal all crashed.
The AMC app and website went down entirely. When they came back online, fans faced hour-long queues just to open the app. Once inside, glitches and error messages appeared. In-person lines outside theaters screening special formats were equally chaotic.
The demand makes sense. Nolan shot 2 million feet of IMAX film for this feature—the first ever shot 100 percent in IMAX. "It's really a wonderful way to retain the original image," Nolan told 60 Minutes. Star Matt Damon said: "What separates him from other directors is the stories he wants to tell are incredibly ambitious and the way he wants to tell them is incredibly ambitious."
The cast is substantial. Alongside Damon, the film includes Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya, and Charlize Theron.
But fans focused on the chaos. Social media erupted with comparisons to Taylor Swift's Ticketmaster crisis. "So Christopher Nolan is the Taylor Swift of movie tickets now?!?" one X user posted. Another wrote: "No bc why are odyssey tickets harder to get than Coachella tickets."
One frustrated fan summed it up: "There's something vexing about the way it's being treated like a concert. There's nothing normal about having to wait an hour to buy a movie ticket."
An X user live-tweeting from AMC Lincoln reported: "Reporting live from hell (the lines for odyssey tickets at amc lincoln)."
Movie tickets for this film are proving as difficult to obtain as concert seats.
