Forty-One Screens on Earth Can Show The Odyssey Properly. They Have Made $66 Million.
IMAX has extended The Odyssey's 70mm run to the end of September — the third extension, taking it to eleven weeks. Forty-one screens in the world can show the film the way it was shot. Those forty-one have taken $66 million between them, which is more than most films make anywhere.
The announcement came from IMAX rather than Universal on Wednesday: extra showtimes at 39 IMAX 70mm auditoriums across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Belgium, France and the Czech Republic, running through 30 September. The stated reason is that showtimes keep selling out weeks ahead.
Two things everyone is getting slightly wrong
It is not expanding. Domestic theatre count has fallen every week since the second: 3,942 at its peak, 2,617 in week seven. What is expanding is those 39 auditoriums and one country — Japan opens on 11 September, in week nine.
And the record is worldwide only. The Odyssey passed Deadpool & Wolverine's $1.338 billion on 20 August to become the highest-grossing R-rated film ever, and it now sits at $1.559 billion. Domestically it is $67 million behind Deadpool at $569.9M against $636.7M, and will probably stay there. Ryan Reynolds conceded the global crown by posting clips of the fight staged inside a Honda Odyssey, with the line "That is one helluva car." A record built on an accidental minivan pun passed to a three-thousand-year-old poem about going home.
The bottleneck is the point
Nolan exposed 2.1 million feet of film — longer than the distance from Toronto to New York — on the first feature shot entirely with IMAX cameras, including a new one built for the production and named after IMAX's late quality chief, David Keighley. The most stubbornly analogue film ever made then did this:
- $457M in IMAX worldwide, close to a third of the total gross, and the highest-grossing IMAX release of all time.
- IMAX dedicated its entire global footprint to one film for three weeks.
- July and August were the two biggest months in IMAX history. The stock hit an all-time high. Rich Gelfond called it an "IMAX awakening."
- $66M from 41 screens on 70mm alone — about $1.6M per screen.
At the BFI IMAX in London it is now the highest-grossing film ever shown there: £2.7 million and 101,000 admissions from a single screen, past Avatar. A fresh batch of tickets on 31 July sold out in under thirty minutes behind a reported 40,000-person virtual queue.
The waiting has become the product
A film about a man who takes ten years to get home has turned queuing into part of the experience. Sold out seven weeks ahead in New York and Los Angeles. Cinemas running 2am, 6am and 7am screenings of a 172-minute picture. In Seoul, 20,000-won IMAX tickets reselling for close to 120,000.
South Korea is the overperformer nobody predicted: 8.47 million admissions by 30 August, the fastest film of 2026 to eight million, number one at the daily box office every single day since release, and now the country's top-grossing foreign film of the year — ahead of Spider-Man.
And two audiences, forty points apart
Metacritic has it at 88, "universal acclaim," from 63 critics. Its user score is 5.6. Rotten Tomatoes' verified-purchase audience meter says 97%, and CinemaScore gave it an A. The people paying $20.58 for an IMAX seat and the people logging a rating afterwards are describing different films.
What happens next is set: digital and 4K on 17 November, exactly 120 days after release, the same long window Oppenheimer had. IMAX's next 70mm commitment is Dune: Part Three in December, and it has said The Odyssey "will likely return in the format multiple times until the end of the year." Oppenheimer came back to 70mm in February 2024, right before the Oscars. Nobody has to say the quiet part.
Related: Summer 2026 is $158M from a record. In real money it is $2 billion short.