I Saw “The Odyssey” in IMAX — Then a Leak Hit X This Weekend

My last trip to a movie theater was Top Gun: Maverick. That's how long it had been. So when my wife and I bought IMAX tickets for The Odyssey at the AMC downtown in Spokane, I figured it had better be worth the drive and the popcorn prices.

It was.

Worth the Wait, Worth the Big Screen

The sound alone justified the ticket price. Every wave crash and sword clash came through that IMAX system with a weight you just don't get at home, no matter how good your soundbar is. The film lived up to the hype building around it for months, and I left the theater glad I'd seen it the way it was meant to be seen — big screen, real sound, no pausing for snacks.

Apparently plenty of other people agree. Opening weekend brought in $123.5 million domestically and $264 million worldwide. The second weekend held strong too, with another $90 million pushing it back to the top of the box office charts. Numbers like that don't happen by accident.

Then the Internet Got Involved

Over the weekend, a bootleg copy surfaced on X. High-quality, full-length, the kind of leak studios dread. A post went up asking, in essence, whether anyone could believe someone had actually uploaded the entire movie — and within two and a half hours, it had racked up more than two million views.

The account behind it got suspended. The video got hit with a takedown notice. But two and a half hours is plenty of time for something to spread across a platform that size, and there's no putting that back in the bottle.

A Reminder for Anyone Still Deciding

If you've been holding off on The Odyssey, do yourself a favor and catch it in theaters while you still can. Streaming will come eventually. Bootlegs clearly already have. But nothing replicates that IMAX sound system rattling the seats around you — and this film earns every bit of it.