Want to see The Odyssey the way Christopher Nolan intended in Las Vegas? That’ll be $51.75. Per person. Including the kids.
Per a new report from The Ankler, Brenden Theatres & IMAX at the Palms, the only theater in Nevada capable of projecting authentic IMAX 70mm film, is charging $51.75 a ticket for The Odyssey, nearly $24 above the national average for an IMAX 70mm screening.
And it’s sold out anyway, through late August.
The math explains the price. There are only 41 theaters in the world that can run IMAX 70mm, 25 of them in the U.S., exactly one of them in Nevada.
Nolan built a format so scarce it prices like a title fight, and Vegas is charging like one.
Six Shows a Day at a Casino
The details in The Ankler’s report read like a heist. Brenden’s projection equipment had sat dormant for over a decade, with COO Robert Lytle noting “we actually hadn’t played anything in 70mm since Interstellar,” another Nolan film, back in 2014.
IMAX approached them three months before release about taking a print.
The initial showtimes sold out instantly. People started flying in from Los Angeles.
So Brenden expanded to an 8 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. schedule, turning over a nearly three-hour epic six times a day, every day, inside a casino resort. The Palms is even selling hotel packages around the screenings.
And the pricing is flat: $50 plus booking fee for every ticket type. Adult, senior, child, all $51.75, for an R-rated film that runs just shy of three hours.
Brenden’s own FAQ confirms monthly and annual member tickets can’t be redeemed for the engagement at all.
Screenings stay sold out through late August, with the theater planning to scale back from six shows to four starting August 14.
Meanwhile, on A-List, It’s Basically Free
Here’s what makes the Vegas number surreal: the same experience costs a fraction elsewhere, or nothing at all. Even in Vegas.
The three Los Angeles-area theaters running IMAX 70mm, Universal CityWalk, the TCL Chinese, and Regal L.A. Live, have been charging around $30 a ticket.
And AMC A-List subscribers can walk into 70mm and even IMAX 70mm showings at AMC locations as part of their monthly subscription, no premium surcharge.
That includes Las Vegas itself. A-List subscribers in town have been catching The Odyssey in standard 70mm at AMC locations at no extra charge, right across the valley from the Palms.
So the $51.75 isn’t really the price of seeing the movie on film. It’s the price of the IMAX in IMAX 70mm, a family of four paying $207 for the giant screen while subscribers across town walk into the same 70mm print as part of their plan.
None of this should shock anyone who watched this rollout from the start. IMAX 70mm presale tickets sold out within minutes a full year before release, with scalpers immediately listing them north of $200.
The scarcity was the marketing. Vegas is just the first market to price it honestly.
The Scarcity Engine Is Printing
The money behind the anecdotes is staggering.
Per Variety, those 41 IMAX 70mm screens worldwide generated $5.2 million just last weekend, roughly $127,000 per screen, and $16.9 million to date, which is 12.1 percent of the film’s entire IMAX gross from a statistical rounding error of screens.
Most 70mm showtimes are sold out into September.
Zoom out and the premium play is the whole story of this run. Per Deadline, enhanced formats, meaning IMAX, PLFs and 70mm combined, drove 57 percent of the film’s record $90 million second weekend, a Nolan career best that beat The Dark Knight’s sophomore frame.
The film sits at $289.3 million domestic and $652 million worldwide, already the highest-grossing R-rated movie of the year.
Some critics argue the premium formats are propping up the whole phenomenon, that the movie is the ticket price.
The 57 percent premium share says they’re half right and it doesn’t matter: Nolan made the format the event, audiences are paying $50 a seat without blinking, and the awareness problem the tracking flagged got solved the old-fashioned way, by becoming the thing everyone has to see the right way.
The stress test arrives tomorrow, when Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens with $200 million-plus projections. Notably, per Deadline, Universal keeps the IMAX screens anyway.
The scarcity engine doesn’t yield the giant screens even for Marvel, and in Vegas, the six-a-day machine at the Palms keeps running either way.
For everything on Nolan’s epic, see our full guide to The Odyssey.
