On the Sunday night of The Odyssey‘s opening weekend, Paul Dergarabedian managed to get tickets to a 70mm showing at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—a packed house, the format filmmaker Christopher Nolan had insisted the film be seen in. Before the feature, a title card appeared on screen: Denis Villeneuve, thanking Nolan for letting the audience see four minutes of exclusive footage for the next anticipated blockbuster: December’s Dune: Part Three.
“The audience erupted,” Dergarabedian recalled. “That was mind-blowing.”
He’d already seen The Odyssey on its first showing, the Thursday prior, but saw it again that Sunday. “That’s a lot of hours,” he said, adding that he may yet go to see it again. But the scene at Grauman’s—the 70mm, the Villeneuve card, the crowd’s response—stayed with him as the clearest evidence of something he’d been watching build all summer.
“This is a memory moment,” he said. “A touchstone moment.”
Dergarabedian, a longtime box office analyst and head of marketplace trends at Rentrak, has watched a lot of summers come and go. He’s been at this a while, noting that he covered the milestone releases of both Jurassic Park in 1993 and Avengers: Endgame in 2019.
