Buying ‘The Odyssey’ Advanced Tickets? It’ll Take You Over an Hour Just to Get on AMC’s Website

We didn’t realize buying tickets to see Christopher Nolan‘s “The Odyssey” was like getting tickets for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour.

In the race to purchase advanced tickets for “The Odyssey,” which went on sale June 4, ticket-buyers who visited AMC Theaters‘ website or used its app were immediately sent to a queue, which an individual with knowledge says was the result of a significant surge in activity and was designed to throttle traffic to the site and keep it from crashing.

Wait times to just get on to the website — not even to then buy tickets for the movie itself, let alone any other film you might be interested in — were listed at over an hour, with the time, at least for this user, continually getting longer as we waited. Talk about a journey.

These were for the purchase of IMAX tickets, for which “The Odyssey” will exclusively be shown when it opens in theaters and on 70mm film on July 17. Fandango also experienced a big surge of traffic, but it appears as if other major ticket buying sites and theater websites were operating more or less normally at time of writing. Quick checks of Regal and Cinemark revealed no such problems on their end.

The individual said that supposedly this has happened before for AMC’s website, and it’s a means of throttling the amount of traffic coming in, but it’s unclear for which prior movie (we wouldn’t be surprised if it was another Nolan film).

“The Odyssey” recently unveiled its 70mm film screening locations across the country, and it’s also going to get a three-week run at the Westwood Theater in Los Angeles under its new ownership.

Nolan’s film went all out with the use of IMAX cameras this time around, so the demand to see it specifically in IMAX will be high and indicative of the type of theatrical event Nolan is unmatched in creating. The film was the first feature shot entirely with IMAX Film cameras, which is a 15-perf/65mm film stock. Along with the new cameras even have a unique, IMAX sound capture and syncing technique referred to as “blimp” that aligns the audio with the image and made it such that Nolan and DP Hoyte van Hoytema could shoot the film entirely on the IMAX cameras.

The whole movie will be seen in IMAX’s exclusive 1.90:1 Expanded Aspect Ratio for the entire film, so yeah, they’re marketing it as truly the only way to see “The Odyssey.” But there will be select IMAX 70mm Film screenings seen in the 1.43:1 Expanded Aspect Ratio, so make sure you’re seeing it in your preferred format. Or do like us and see it in every format!

“The Odyssey” is Nolan’s follow-up to his Best Picture-winning “Oppenheimer,” which grossed nearly a billion dollars at the global box office. This film has a stacked cast that includes Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, and many more, and is Nolan’s re-telling of the ancient Greek epic written by Homer.