The next phase of The Odyssey‘s marketing is about to kick off. Christopher Nolan’s next film will reportedly unveil its first full-length trailer alongside screenings of Avatar: Fire & Ash when it releases next Friday, December 19 – but some people will get an even longer look a full week early. A special, six-minute prologue to The Odyssey will play before the IMAX 70mm re-releases of Sinners and One Battle After Another, which will return to theaters this Friday.
This is just the latest move in a campaign that’s leaned into exclusivity to generate hype. At a time when most trailers drop online and aim for maximum virality, The Odyssey‘s teaser trailer, released with Jurassic World Rebirth in July, debuted exclusively in theaters. The footage has since leaked online, but Universal has yet to post it officially. On July 17, a year from the film’s release, tickets for some of its premium format screenings went on sale. Several screenings sold out.
The latter move struck many as more reminiscent of concerts than cinema screenings, and the comparison wasn’t complimentary. For many, it was antithetical to what the movies should be, and the next phase in moviegoing’s transition from a casual pastime to a handful-of-times-per-year event. But unlike most movies, The Odyssey is an event on that scale, and the way it’s being marketed is actually what theaters need right now.
The Odyssey Is Making Movie Theaters Feel Special Again
“Eventizing” is often positioned as what needs to happen to get people into theaters these days, and wrapped up in that is the need to make a film feel unmissable. Certain viewers will always gravitate toward the theatrical experience, but if mainstream audiences don’t feel like they have to see something on the big screen, there’s little incentivizing them not to wait for its digital or streaming release. This was what the MCU at its height did best, and why the rest of Hollywood spent so long chasing shared continuities.
But there are other ways to create that feeling. Nolan’s Oppenheimer really emphasized the specificity of the IMAX format, and IMAX 70mm specifically, as the definitive way to experience the movie, something that couldn’t truly be replicated at home. Audiences responded by seeking out those screenings in what almost seemed like a movement. This year, Ryan Coogler exploited the same trend with Sinners, and even managed to grow it; a video of him explaining the different projection formats of his movie in detail was hailed as a stroke of promotional genius.
The Odyssey is mining that vein again, but also going far beyond it. Now it’s not only the movie that needs to be experienced in theaters, but the trailers. There’s excitement around the next generation of IMAX cameras. Universal is going out of its way to make sure that people associate Nolan’s latest movie with cinemas specifically, and nothing else.
It’s true that Hollywood and the theater industry need to find a way to revive (or at least stabilize) moviegoing as a more regular practice, but movies like The Odyssey aren’t going to do that. Event films like this need to let themselves be a big deal. And this film’s FOMO-heavy marketing strategy is making theaters themselves feel like a big deal, too. If audiences show up in July 2026 and come away feeling like they’ve had a special experience at the movies, The Odyssey will have done its job.
- Release Date
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July 17, 2026
- Producers
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Emma Thomas