08/25/2026
Christopher Nolan's screening of THE ODYSSEY at the TN Aquarium IMAX is breaking records --
* (From Sam Still - Chattanooga Times-Free Press)
As the Tennessee Aquarium IMAX has sold out all ‘Odyssey’ screenings to date, the run HAS NOW BEEN EXTENDED to mid-September . . .
Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," is proving to be a genuine blockbuster for Chattanooga's Tennessee Aquarium IMAX 3D Theater -- shattering records for ticket sales.
"We anticipated it was going to do well for us, certainly," Corey Cobb, the theater's director of IMAX operations, said by phone. "We've not had a single show to date that's not been sold out."
Chattanooga's largest silver screen began showing Nolan's adaptation of Homer's classic Greek epic on July 16 and has since sold about 36,000 tickets, according to Cobb.
The film has shattered records for ticket presales and gross box office revenue for the Aquarium theater -- records set by Nolan's previous film, "Oppenheimer." That film sold about 8,000 tickets during its run in 2023, Cobb said.
Due to the film's success, the aquarium IMAX theater has extended its run of "The Odyssey" into mid-September.
"The Odyssey" also has the potential to single-handedly outperform all Hollywood films screened at the theater in a single year, Cobb said. All of those combined resulted in over 39,000 tickets sold in 2025; "The Odyssey" could cross 40,000, Cobb said.
Since the pandemic, movie theaters' biggest competition has been the couch, and getting people off the couch, out of the house and into a theater requires a special experience, Cobb said. The success of "The Odyssey" has shown there is clearly an appetite for premium movie formats, Cobb said.
For "The Odyssey," the aquarium theater reinstalled its IMAX 70-millimeter film projector, allowing it to screen the film in the same format it was shot. "The Odyssey" has been promoted as the first feature-length film to be shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film. The Chattanooga theater is one of only 25 theaters in the U.S. capable of screening the film in its native format.
"If you feel like you could just watch this when it comes out on Netflix, then you might just wait," Cobb said. "But there's certainly these event-like screenings where you know there's no way to recreate that experience at home."
So far, residents from 45 states have bought tickets for "The Odyssey" at Chattanooga's IMAX theater, Cobb said. ZIP code information from ticket purchases shows that Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming are the only U.S. states not represented. Moviegoers from ZIP codes in Quebec have also purchased tickets for the film, Cobb said.
Five weeks into the film's run at the aquarium theater, a Thursday evening screening of "The Odyssey" still had people lining up well before the doors to the auditorium opened.
Out-of-town moviegoers said the IMAX 70mm format was a major draw to see the film in Chattanooga.
"We wanted the whole experience minus all the splashing and the moving," Jill Jordan of Sweetwater, Tennessee, said in an interview. "We wanted to do a real IMAX theater."
Thursday's screening was the earliest one Kobe Husser could get tickets for due to the number of sold-out screenings, he said. Husser and his girlfriend, Anna Hawk, said they had already seen "The Odyssey" at a standard theater.
"Even after watching it ... I was like, 'Yep, I gotta go see it in 70mm,'" Husser said in an interview.
As a husband and father, Joe Hildreth of Smyrna, Georgia, does not have much time to go see movies, he said in an interview. Prior to Thursday's screening, it had been a few years since Hildreth had seen a movie at a theater. Given that "The Odyssey" was shot on IMAX 70mm film and the aquarium theater had reinstalled its film projector for the movie, Hildreth said it was a "special treat" to make the drive to Chattanooga to see the film.
In 2016, the IMAX theater switched out its film projector for a digital dual-laser projection system, which still offers the large-scale, high-quality images of the IMAX format but without the cumbersome nature of a physical medium like film. At the time, the film projector was nearly sawed in half so that it could be transported out of the projection booth and taken out to scrap, Cobb said.
Instead, Cobb intervened and had the projector kept in the booth. He wasn't thinking the theater would ever run film again, but recognized the projector's importance to the theater's history, he said. Now that the projector has been reinstalled, Cobb said "it sits where it sits," even if the appetite for the film format dwindles again.
But the film resurgence does not appear to be slowing down anytime soon.
On Tuesday, the aquarium IMAX theater opened ticket sales for "Dune: Part Three," which releases in December. The aquarium theater is set to screen the movie on 70mm film.
"Dune: Part Three" surpassed the ticket presale numbers of "The Odyssey" within the first hour, Cobb said, suggesting that the next installment in the blockbuster sci-fi film series will be yet another success for the local theater.
YOU CAN GET TICKETS at:
https://tickets.tnaqua.org/events/019e8918-8218-7e26-a278-d0aa7a63f93e/
