by Josh Rosenberg
So you want to see Dune: Part Three in theaters, huh? Looks good, doesn’t it? Everyone’s saying it’s the biggest movie of the year after The Odyssey. Plus, director Denis Villeneuve just told fans that IMAX 70mm was the best format around! Timothée Chalamet’s in it. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson too. Let’s see if there are any tickets available...
What’s this? The AMC website is down? Oh, and they’re all sold out anyway? And scalpers are already reselling them for upwards of $1,000 on eBay?!
You close the tab, get back to your thankless job, and accept your fate. In a few months, you’ll watch Dune: Part Three on a teensy screen in the crustiest, smallest theater at your local AMC. You didn’t think this would be like trying to nab tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. But here you are. You can’t go to the theaters even if you actually want to anymore. It’s out of control.
According to AMC, ticketing traffic roughly tripled since the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day this summer. That movie, by the way, just passed $2 billion worldwide and became one the top ten highest-grossing films of all time. Partly, I assume, because it wasn’t offered in IMAX 70mm. You can still see all the films you want in regular showings, but the premium format—filmed using special IMAX cameras—is becoming one of the most sought-after experiences of the year.
A friend of mine last week told me that he hasn’t seen The Odyssey yet because the nearest date that an IMAX 70mm ticket was available for in his area wasn’t until September. He nabbed them, of course. After all, director Christopher Nolan swears that IMAX 70mm is the ideal way to see his film. But he’s probably right. Images on social media comparing how much of the image is lost when you squish the frame down to the regular widescreen showings really drove the point home for audiences. No one wants a lesser experience.
When AMC suggested raising prices for the best seats in the theater earlier this year, audiences rioted. Turning the theater experience into an airline with economy and first-class tickets sounded like a surefire way to piss everyone off. Now? It doesn’t even matter what the tickets would have cost, because you can’t even buy them through AMC.
“What a shit show,” a Reddit user commented on the r/AMCTheaters subreddit after the Dune: Part Three tickets went live and the website crashed. “The AMC app doesn't even open. It crashes immediately,” another person wrote. “Seriously,” another chimed in. “They need to figure out how to meet demand with those screens—too few of them.”
The response was so bad that AMC CEO Adam Aron issued a lengthy apology, stating that AMC was simply not prepared for the number of people who wanted to see the film.
“We try so hard to be expert in what we usually do so well, devoted as we are to pleasing hundreds of millions of guests in our theatres each year,” Aron wrote. “Today, though, as Dune 3 tickets went on sale, the crushing volumes briefly slowed or glitched our online ticketing systems.”
He continued: “It’s a high class problem to have such staggering demand, but even so it is intolerable and inexcusable. It just can not and should not happen, because as AMC is the clear market leader, you deserve better from us. There was much discussion internally ahead of and preparing for the Dune 3 launch. We thought we were ready, but we weren’t.
“Dune 3,” Aron reminded readers at the end of his statement, “will open on December 18.”
Well, they’re all sold out, Mr. Aron. At the AMC Lincoln Square IMAX 70mm in New York City by Esquire’s offices, you can’t see Dune: Part Three until the new year unless you want to sit in the front row at 2:30 a.m. on a Wednesday. But at that offering, the “premium format” starts to lose all value.
Meanwhile, scalpers are reselling IMAX tickets on eBay for hundreds of dollars. There are four tickets at the Lincoln Square location for a showing on December 28 that are currently up on the website for $400. It’s one of more than 300 results that populated when I searched “Dune 3 70mm tickets,” and it’s nowhere near the most expensive offerings. Some people are listing their tickets at more than $1,000—even for IMAX locations in Tempe, Arizona. Hell, the eight-course chef’s tasting at Le Bernardin is only $350 per person!
The big problem, of course, is that there aren’t enough IMAX 70mm theaters to meet the demand. IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond told Variety that “they haven’t made new IMAX projectors in about 50 years.” Maybe they should start.
“We retrofit them, rebuild them, and part of our strategy is to see how far we can take it,” he explained. “But certainly, demand-driven, I’d like to see more.”
Why don’t they make more? Well, new IMAX projectors for 70mm film cost around $1.2 million each. And just because there’s demand right now for The Odyssey and Dune: Part Three doesn’t mean that audiences want to see films in IMAX 70mm all the time. It’s a risk, Gelfond says.
First, it was “people don’t go to the movies anymore.” Now too many people are trying to go to the movies. Maybe one day we’ll figure it out. Until then, I’ll see you at Dune: Part Three in March.
