The Odyssey IMAX Prologue Bet Has Paid $485 Million

A 5-minute 47-second prologue of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey hit 10 IMAX 70mm screens on December 12, 2025, and the studio never posted it. It ran in front of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, then followed James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash onto IMAX. By September 8, 2026, the finished film had $1.640 billion worldwide.

The reel was the loudest move in a year-long wager that the only honest way to see the movie was on IMAX film.

A 5-Minute, 47-Second Trojan Horse Never Went Online

Universal and IMAX confirmed the playdates in the second week of December. An exhibitor timed the cut at 5 minutes 47 seconds. A shorter trailer went out with every copy of Avatar: Fire and Ash from December 19, while the long prologue kept running in front of IMAX shows of that film.

A one-minute teaser had already played that summer with Jurassic World Rebirth and Superman, and that clip stayed in theaters too. The December reel was the one people planned trips around, because the studio had no plan to put those minutes on the internet.

The official film account told IMAX audiences to catch the prologue in front of Avatar: Fire and Ash.

A film by Christopher Nolan shot entirely with IMAX film cameras. Experience The Odyssey prologue in IMAX before Avatar: Fire and Ash. pic.twitter.com/uGImf8sbFv

— The Odyssey Movie (@odysseymovie) December 18, 2025

THE YEAR THE FOOTAGE STAYED IN THEATERS

1. July 17, 2025: Universal puts select IMAX 70mm tickets on sale, one year before release, and more than 25,000 seats across 22 locations move fast.
2. Summer 2025: A one-minute teaser plays with Jurassic World Rebirth and Superman and is not posted online.
3. December 12, 2025: The 5-minute 47-second prologue opens on 10 IMAX 70mm screens in front of Sinners and One Battle After Another.
4. December 19, 2025: Avatar: Fire and Ash takes the IMAX circuit; the long prologue stays on IMAX, and a shorter trailer plays in front of the rest.
5. July 6, 2026: The film premieres at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in London.
6. July 17, 2026: The Odyssey opens wide in the United States and the United Kingdom at 173 minutes, rated R.

Nolan had used Avatar as a billboard before. The Oppenheimer trailer rode in front of Avatar: The Way of Water, and IMAX later took about 20 percent of that film’s ticket sales. This time the studio asked people to sit through almost six minutes of Troy before someone else’s movie, then wait until July.

Tickets Went on Sale a Year Before Anyone Saw a Frame

The wager did not start in December. On July 17, 2025, Universal opened IMAX 70mm pre-sales for a movie that would not exist in theaters for a year. Those 22 locations and 25,000-plus tickets were for the feature, not for the prologue, and they told the company the format could sell itself.

an early IMAX prologue leak had already been circulating when exhibitors locked the December 12 date. The calendar made the scarcity feel designed: a teaser you could not rewind at home, then a prologue on a circuit so small you could list it on one page, then a summer opening on the same kind of screen.

Rich Gelfond, chief executive of IMAX, has said Nolan called him in 2024 with a simple offer. If the company could solve the noise and weight problems that had always kept IMAX film cameras out of dialogue scenes, Nolan would shoot the whole movie that way. The December reel was how that promise first reached a paying crowd.

What Played in Front of Sinners and One Battle After Another

The 5-minute 47-second cut is a Trojan Horse sequence, framed as a war story Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus tells Tom Holland’s Telemachus, and it ends on a glimpse of the Cyclops. People who sat through those December shows saw Matt Damon’s Odysseus packed inside the horse with his men, then a night raid to open the gates of Troy.

A writer shown about five minutes in Nolan’s screening room heard the picture open on a question about the horse, then a beach haul, then the night assault. The finished prologue that reached IMAX matches that shape, with one extra sting at the end.

BEATS IN THE DECEMBER REEL

• The question: Menelaus pulls Telemachus aside and asks whether he heard the story of the horse, and whether he heard it from the inside.
• The haul: The wooden horse is dragged on logs and ropes up a beach toward Troy, listing in the sand.
• The test: Trojan soldiers ram spears into the horse; a Greek is hit, and Odysseus covers the man’s mouth so he cannot cry out.
• The night: Odysseus leads men out of the horse and toward the gates in a close, brutal fight.
• The sting: Brief sea images, then a shot of the Cyclops, in some accounts a hand snatching a soldier into the dark.

Homer’s poem starts after Troy has already fallen. Nolan put the horse at the front anyway, and later told interviewers he had wanted that listing silhouette since he nearly directed the 2004 film Troy. Inside the horse the sequence is cramped, hot, and ugly on purpose. It plays like a raid, not a myth postcard, which is why some early trailer viewers argued the Bronze Age looked too dark. The point of putting that footage on 70mm first was the size of the wood, the ropes, and the city wall, which ordinary screens would crop.

The 10 Theaters That Got the Full Prologue

For the week of December 12, the full prologue existed in 10 IMAX 70mm houses, all of them running the Sinners and One Battle After Another reissues through December 18. That is a different, smaller map than the 22 locations that had already sold the feature a year out, and a different map again from the 41 IMAX 70mm sites that would play the movie in July.

WHERE THE FULL PROLOGUE PLAYED

Those 10 rooms were the only places to see the long cut in the format it was shot for. Digital IMAX later carried the prologue in front of Avatar, and regular auditoriums got the short trailer. Fans who wanted the horse at full height had a week and a short list of cities. Some bought Sinners or One Battle After Another tickets for the first six minutes and treated the feature as extra.

Nolan Made IMAX Quiet Enough for Dialogue

The Odyssey is the first feature shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, with cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema. Older IMAX 15-perf/65mm bodies were too loud for a whisper. Van Hoytema has compared the transport to an unhinged lawn mower, which is why Nolan’s earlier films dropped to quieter cameras whenever people had to talk.

IMAX built a sound-proof housing the crew called the blimp, and in some accounts a quieter body named the Keighley, after David Keighley, the longtime IMAX film executive. Fully loaded, the blimp rig weighed in the 300-to-400-pound range and took a crew of six to move. Mirrors went on the sides so two actors could still find each other’s eyeline around the box.

The blimp system is a game-changer. You can be shooting a foot from an actor’s face while they’re whispering and get usable sound. What that opens up are intimate moments of performance on the world’s most beautiful format.

Christopher Nolan, to Empire

The production consumed more than two million feet of Kodak film, about 379 miles of 15-perf 65mm negative, processed at FotoKem in Burbank. Nolan said they shot over 2 million feet and wanted the journeys to feel physical. Principal photography ran from February to August 2025 in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, Western Sahara, and Malta, with additional work at the Universal lot in Los Angeles. The $250 million budget is among the highest of his career. Emma Thomas produced with him under Syncopy for Universal.

July 17 Turned Scarcity Into $1.640 Billion

The Odyssey opened July 17, 2026, on 3,919 North American theaters. Rentrak logged $124.5 million in the United States and Canada from Thursday through Sunday, $139.6 million overseas, and $264.1 million worldwide, Nolan’s largest global start. IMAX reported a record-breaking $52 million IMAX opening, including $29.6 million in North America from 444 screens, a 23.8 percent share of the domestic weekend. The 41 IMAX 70mm sites took $6.3 million, about $153,000 a screen.

AMC added 2 a.m., 3 a.m., and 6 a.m. 70mm shows in some cities, and most of those sold out. Gelfond said Nolan had used the cameras in a way no one had, and that presales already reached into week five. The same scarcity that made the December prologue a scavenger hunt now showed up as overnight lines for the feature.

As of August 10, IMAX said the film had become the highest-grossing IMAX release of all time at $289 million, passing Avatar, with IMAX then taking more than 26 percent of the movie’s global total. The 41 film houses had $37.5 million of that, led by the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles at $2.8 million. North American IMAX stood at $147 million, the company’s best domestic title. IMAX also said it had never before strung together four straight weekends above $50 million worldwide.

THE FIGURES THE DECEMBER BET WAS AIMING AT

As of September 8 the film had $591 million in the United States and Canada and $1.049 billion abroad. That $1.640 billion total made it Nolan’s highest-grossing film, the highest-grossing R-rated film on record, and the second-highest-grossing movie of 2026. The cost of the bet is visible on a regular screen. A large share of the frame the new cameras were built to fill disappears there, and that crop has followed the movie since July. People who cannot reach one of the 41 film houses are watching a smaller picture than the one the December prologue was designed to sell.

Japan’s IMAX Dates Run Into Mid-September

China opened August 14. Japan’s IMAX premiere in Tokyo on September 10 played to a packed house, with the wider Japan opening on September 11. IMAX has the title booked through at least September 17, and 70mm dates that were due to end in mid-August were stretched after weeks of sellouts.

Damon leads as Odysseus, with Holland as Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Zendaya as Athena, and Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, and Bernthal in the company. Ludwig Göransson wrote the score and Jennifer Lame edited. The December reel asked a few thousand people in 10 rooms to sit through Troy in the format the rest of the movie would demand. The $1.640 billion, and the IMAX record, are what that demand looked like once the rest of the world was allowed in.

Tokyo filled an IMAX house on September 10 for a film that has been in theaters since July. The 70mm rooms that showed the prologue in December are still the rooms people fight to enter.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Long Is The Odyssey and Where Did It Premiere?

The Odyssey runs 173 minutes and premiered at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in London on July 6, 2026, eleven days before the July 17 opening in the United States and the United Kingdom. The British premiere house later reported a first-week IMAX take that more than doubled its previous high, set by Dune: Part Two.

Where Was The Odyssey Filmed?

Nolan shot on location in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, Western Sahara, and Malta, then finished additional work at the Universal Studios Lot in Los Angeles. The Cyclops cave work used Nestor’s Cave in Messenia, Greece, with live sheep on the floor and a curtain of bees at the mouth that Damon said you can hear in the movie.

Who Scored and Cut The Odyssey?

Ludwig Göransson composed the score and Jennifer Lame edited, both returning from prior Nolan films. Hoyte van Hoytema photographed the picture on IMAX film cameras, and the release prints include 35mm, 5-perf 70mm, and IMAX 70mm versions all made from Kodak stock.

Did Christopher Nolan Almost Direct Troy Instead?

Nolan came close to directing the 2004 Brad Pitt film Troy, which adapts material from the Iliad rather than the Odyssey. He kept one image from that near-miss, a Trojan horse listing over in the sand in a way that echoes the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, and he put that silhouette into The Odyssey as the start of the December prologue.

How Large Is an IMAX 70mm Print of The Odyssey?

A coiled IMAX 70mm print of the film weighs about 600 pounds and runs some 11 miles of Kodak 70mm stock on the platter in the booth. That print is the 18K film presentation IMAX sells at the 41 auditoriums equipped to show it, the same circuit that first carried the 5-minute 47-second prologue.