A 900-seat theatre in Glendale, California that had not shown a first-run movie in 35 years is now the highest-grossing cinema in the United States for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey on 70mm film, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The Alex Theatre's last first-run engagement was Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991. When Nolan's epic opened on July 17, 2026, the venue broke that drought in spectacular fashion — charging $27 a ticket and running three screenings a day, a schedule it has since extended by at least two weeks.

The turnaround took six weeks of preparation and $500,000 in technical upgrades, including a new ground-floor projection booth. Taylor Umphenour, an Imax consultant who has worked with Nolan on his dailies — the raw footage reviewed each day during filming — oversaw the design and construction. The 70mm format the Alex uses runs on the same film stock as Imax 70mm, but moves the film vertically through the projector rather than horizontally, as the Los Angeles Times reported.

Artistic director Miles Williams is not stopping there. The Alex plans to schedule eight to 10 nights of movie programming each month, with periodic large-format special engagements lined up: Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Three in December and Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew in February 2027.

The Alex's achievement sits inside a much larger box-office story. The Odyssey opened to $123.5 million domestically — the United States and Canada — and $263.7 million worldwide over its launch weekend, as The Hollywood Reporter noted. By the weekend it ceded first place to Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the domestic total had climbed to $395.5 million. London's BFI IMAX set its own mark, grossing £219,867 ($296,147) over three days — the biggest opening weekend of any Imax venue, per The Hollywood Reporter.

Imax as a company posted its highest-grossing month in history in July 2026: $257 million, driven largely by The Odyssey, according to Imax. Demand for the large-format presentations has been fierce. Imax 70mm tickets for The Odyssey were being resold for $300 to $400, The Hollywood Reporter found.

What makes the Alex Theatre's run stand out is the scale of the gamble. A mid-sized venue spending half a million dollars to install 70mm projection — a format most cinemas abandoned decades ago — for a single filmmaker's movie is not a safe bet. It is a bet that audiences will travel for the difference between watching a film and experiencing it the way its director intended, on physical film running through a machine at 24 frames per second. For at least two more weeks, three times a day, they are proving that bet right.