It is inevitable: each new premiere of a film directed by Christopher Nolan is more than the essential cinephile event of the year. It is a cultural event. And that will happen again with ‘The Odyssey’, the epic adventure film inspired by Homer’s classic stories and that a year before its premiere has managed to raise an expectation never seen before. Everything is part of a carefully drawn plan.
Odise & co. The only announcement of ‘The Odyssey’ has already put the expectations in the clouds: Christopher Nolan, the technologically more advanced director of the moment, will adapt a classic adventure, a founding story of the epic stories, and whose footprint in the world culture is unbarkable. I was going to decorate it with a cast, as always in his cinema, of consecrated stars (Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal …). It produces Universal again, with whom he already worked at the Oscarizadísima ‘Oppenheimer’ and the premiere is scheduled for July 17, 2026.
A year earlier. To stand this strategy, Universal put tickets on July 17, a year before the premiere of the film already knowing that Nolan’s name is more than enough to sell ‘The Odyssey’, without the need for trailers. They are the passes for the first weekend, in the exclusive 70 mm IMAX format, the one preferred by Nolan. The tickets were exhausted in a single day and, of course, it soon unleashed the speculative fever, with resale of up to 200 pounds in London (a phenomenon that Nolan already knows: it happened with ‘Oppenheimer’).
A bold bet. The typical marketing of the great productions, especially those of the expected summer premieres, usually starts from 4 to 6 months before the premiere. Nolan has skipped the norm bending that period of time and in a format that also knows that it is exclusive (in Spain, for example, there are no cinemas that project in this format). 95% of the tickets sold out in minutes, generating 1.5 million dollars of benefits … before the film has finished its production.
IMAX, the future. A few days ago, BBC linked the success of this Universal Marketing operation to the previous success of a Warner movie, Ryan Cogler’s vampire adventures ‘Los Linadores’. The director expressed on numerous occasions his love for the IMAX format and the film became a success in that format. According to BBC, this semi-united success could have encouraged Universal for this early sale, relying on the support without palliative that Nolan has always made the format.
An excellent timing To claim the formats in the room, now that it is clear that the recovery of pre-pandemic box office figures may never arrive.
Nolan, for elites. Nolan is still a rara opinion Inside the cinema. You can afford to make the films that you want: science fiction would be with Kubrickians to continue your trilogy about Batman, and after that, more twisted science fiction and a biopic without fantastic elements, and then refer to this new classical epic epic. And they will always be successes. But if other directors dared to experiment with their same approaches, tones and themes, possibly the box office would not accompany them, seeing the preferences of the public. Nolan is an isolated phenomenon, and that is why the following steps of the industry so that the public goes back to the rooms must be extremely careful.
Christopher Nolan’s eternal paradox: razes at the box office, success after success even one year in advance, but that does not mean anything. An islet in a sea of sequelae.
Image | Gtres – Warner
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