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‘Interstellar’ tickets are selling for $215 in NYC — 10 years after its release
By
Ryan Kailath
Published Nov 27, 2024
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By
Ryan Kailath
Published Nov 27, 2024
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A decade after it was first released, the epic science fiction drama “Interstellar” is returning to movie theaters nationwide for a limited run on Dec. 6.
And with tickets at AMC Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side sold out, fans are swarming message boards and resale sites, where individual tickets are going for as much as $215, attempting to score a seat at one of the 24 special screenings there.
The 2014 blockbuster starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Timothée Chalamet and others was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the auteur behind box office spectacles like “Oppenheimer,” “Dunkirk,” and the 2000s Batman trilogy starring Christian Bale.
The director has a cult following among film fans, many of whom find the deep space backdrop of "Interstellar" – which features what physicists and astronomers have called one of the most scientifically-accurate depictions of a black hole – to be the perfect fit for Nolan’s large-scale vision.
Nolan is famous for shooting nearly all of his movies on 70mm IMAX film, a format which many professionals consider the gold standard for quality as it captures far more visual information than digital cameras or the more common 35mm film. Only 19 rooms in the country are equipped to show these extra-large prints – including one at the AMC Lincoln Square in New York City.
“These IMAX 70mm screenings, words can’t do it justice,” said Karim Kaylani, a 23-year-old software engineer who managed to snag a seat. “When you live in proximity to a theater that shows these, you feel blessed. It’s something you’ve got to experience once.”
Kaylani saw “Interstellar” in theaters 10 years ago and has rewatched it many times since, he said. He followed closely as the re-release was announced earlier this year and then delayed, and set calendar reminders and notifications for the on-sale date of Nov. 7.
But tickets were gone in a flash after a few internet sleuths discovered that AMC began to preload tickets online the night before, according to an IMAX spokesperson.
Muaz Azam, a 21-year-old student at SUNY Broome Community College in Binghamton, was one of the lucky few to grab a ticket. He said he planned on taking the bus three hours into the city by himself for a coveted Sunday afternoon show before heading back home that night. It’s his first time traveling that far for a movie, he said.
“If there was ever a movie to drive three hours for, for me, it’s 'Interstellar,'” Azam said. “It has everything you want in a movie.”
He had joined several subreddits for Interstellar, IMAX movies, Christopher Nolan fans and AMC theaters, and noticed that tickets were on sale the night before the official release. Despite that early warning, he said, most of the seats were sold out by the time he started looking, around 10 p.m.
Tessa Senders runs one of those cinephile Reddit forums, r/NYCmovies, where she and her co-moderator had to create a separate “mega-thread” to handle all the traffic and chatter about the “Interstellar” re-release.
“This has kind of become the ‘Eras Tour’ of movie-going,” Senders said, referring to Taylor Swift’s record-breaking concert run. “It’s been continuous posts about: ‘When do they go on sale? Does anyone have extra tickets? Are my seats okay?’ There are people who are traveling to New York for this because they’re so excited to see it on the really big screen.”
Senders doesn’t allow redditors to sell tickets above face value on her forum, but said she understands that it can’t always be stopped. When members reported a “scammer” who was selling fake tickets, the moderators moved quickly to ban that person, she said.
Elliott Melcer, who is still looking for a ticket to a 70mm IMAX screening, said someone on the forum tried to sell him one for $150, which he wasn’t willing to pay. He said he was surprised to learn seats are selling for even more online.
“I should have bought them and then resold them,” Melcer joked.
He said he purchased a ticket to a regular, non-70mm IMAX screening, but is hoping one of the coveted large-scale tickets will come through in time.
“It’s just so grand,” Melcer said of the film. “Space is so vast, you just want to feel like you’re tiny in this theater.”
With every seat sold out for each of the 24 screenings at AMC Lincoln Square, the theater can expect to gross more than $400,000 from the six-day run.
Other theaters around the country have expanded their showings, but AMC Lincoln Square has not yet added new shows
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Ryan Kailath
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