Timothée Chalamet in “Dune: Part Three.”Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Tickets for IMAX 70mm screenings of Dune: Part Three, including early showings, went on sale on Aug. 18. What followed was chaos.
On social media, fans scrambling to buy tickets online lamented that sites like Fandango and AMC were crashing. If you were actually able to make it onto a site, chances are you were met with a virtual queue with a long wait time, as if you were waiting to snag Taylor Swift concert tickets on Ticketmaster instead of plan a night at the movies.
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In a statement on X, AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron addressed the “crushing volume” that caused AMC’s online ticketing systems to glitch, saying that ticketing traffic “reached levels approximately three times higher than what we experienced during the Spider-Man: Brand New Day ticket launch, which itself followed strong advance sales for The Odyssey ticket launch before that.”
Dune: Part Threeticket pandemonium wasn’t just online. At New York City’s Lincoln Square AMC location, home to one of the largest IMAX screens in the U.S., a line to buy IMAX 70mm Dune: Part Threetickets wrapped around the block, with people camping out beforehand. According to social media users, someone in line even bought 80 tickets.
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On resale sites, scalpers are now listing tickets for hundreds of dollars. AMC terms and conditions prohibit the resale of any ticket for over face value. AMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment about how it enforces this rule.
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This fervor doesn’t just stem from excitement about Dune: Part Three, although that is certainly high. It also comes down to the exclusivity of the IMAX 70mm format, which became a major talking point in the lead-up to The Odyssey‘s release. Only 41 theaters in the world are capable to showing movies in this format, 25 of which are in the U.S.
Despite the scarcity of theaters that can actually show films in IMAX 70mm, the format has become tied to the marketing of two of the year’s buzziest films. In The Odyssey‘s case, director Christopher Nolan has long been a champion of the IMAX 70mm format. In 2023, he said it the “best possible” way to see Oppenheimer.That goes double for The Odyssey, which is the first movie to be shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, meaning if you see it in any other format, you lose a sizable amount of the frame.
Dune: Part Threeis taking a similar approach to The Odysseywith its emphasis on seeing the film in premium formats. In April, tickets for opening weekend IMAX 70mm screenings sold out in minutes. In July, IMAX theaters hosted fan screenings of the trailer and footage. Said footage screened before The Odyssey,but only before IMAX 70mm screenings.
A press release from IMAX tied to yesterday’s ticket release states that “Dune was, in director Denis Villeneuve’s own words, ‘dreamed, designed, and shot’ for the format, making IMAX the definitive way to experience the film as he intended.”
Both campaigns aren’t just telling audiences to see these movies. They’re saying that they need to see them in the way that best matches the director’s vision, which just so happens to be the most exclusive fashion. That emphasis on IMAX 70mm stokes the high demand that inevitably leads to site crashes, scalpers, and FOMO for people who aren’t close to a theater. Because nowadays, just seeing an event movie like The Odysseyor Dune: Part Three isn’t good enough. Howyou see it is just as important.
Belen Edwards is an Entertainment Reporter at Mashable. She covers movies and TV with a focus on fantasy and science fiction, adaptations, animation, and more nerdy goodness. She is a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Television Critics Association, as well as a Tomatometer-approved critic.
