Getting a ticket to see the hottest movie of the summer in the IMAX theater in Lincoln Square is its own perilous “Odyssey” featuring the siren song of scammers and scalpers.
AMC Lincoln Square 13 Theater on the Upper West Side is the only spot in the city — and one of just 41 in the world — capable of projecting the full IMAX 70mm cut of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” which premiered Friday.
Lincoln Square is the second-largest IMAX movie theater in the world, with a screen 75.6 feet high and 101 feet wide (the largest is in Melbourne, Australia). The Homeric Hollywood epic is the first feature-length film shot entirely using an IMAX 70mm film camera.
The theater holds more than 400 seats and is hosting four to five screenings of the film each day. Nevertheless, nearly every seat for each of the IMAX 70-millimeter showings at Lincoln Square is sold out, according to the theater’s website.
That’s created an opportunity for scalpers and scammers. The $33 tickets to New York’s only “true IMAX” screenings are going for hundreds of dollars on eBay, Reddit and other resale sites.
“I came from Florida just to watch it on this screen,” said Mahesh Gari, 45, who went to the 7 a.m. screening of “The Odyssey” on Friday. “It’s Nolan. Anything he makes is going to be worth the trip.”
Like Odysseus’ voyage home from Troy, the search for a ticket to one of the shows on the secondary market is filled with pitfalls and monsters. Scammers have swindled film buffs into paying for bogus tickets, according to interviews.
Gabe Amaya, 29, a Harlem resident and frequent moviegoer, said he missed out on presale tickets to the movie. Wrapped up in “The Odyssey” mania, he posted on Reddit that he was looking for tickets. Several accounts reached out to him and asked for money up front, he said.
“I was kind of blinded by this fever of getting these tickets, so I sent them some money,” he said. “I actually sent them $50, and they ghosted me immediately.”
Despite the scam, he kept the faith in the Reddit community and continued searching. Eventually, Amaya said, he got in touch with a Redditor from Arkansas who had purchased the tickets nearly a year in advance but missed his flight. He said he bought a genuine ticket for Friday’s 7 p.m. showing and “ended up in a group chat with five stranger Redditors who I will be meeting up with tonight to enter the movie together.”
On a local Reddit forum where tickets to Lincoln Square showings are being bought and resold, dozens of users complain about being scammed. Several people on the forum said scammers often ask for payment up front and tend to offer multiple ticket options, despite the limited availability of seats.
AMC representatives did not immediately respond to requests to comment.
“I think the IMAX 70 millimeter of it all has kind of created this culture of exclusivity in the film community,” said Giovanny Diaz De Leon, an AMC employee at Lincoln Square. “It’s really pushed the demand to levels that I don’t think we’ve had for a while.”
Diaz De Leon said he worked a graveyard shift from midnight to 8 a.m. on Friday for the first time in his three years working for AMC.
There will be plenty more graveyard shifts to work over the next month. AMC has scheduled regular 2 a.m. screenings at Lincoln Square through at least Aug. 7.