July 18, 2026
Seat Wars: The IMAX Awakens
Show HN: Get alerts for good seats at 70mm IMAX showings of The Odyssey
Movie fans are now fighting bots, sleep schedules, and each other for the perfect seat
TLDR: A new site tracks seat openings for the tiny number of giant 70mm IMAX showings of *The Odyssey*, helping fans grab better spots without constantly checking theaters. Commenters loved it, but also exposed the chaos: homemade bots, anti-bot blocks, and a mini-debate over whether this is smart planning or pure movie FOMO.
A hacker made a gloriously over-the-top site to hunt down good seats for The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX — the giant-screen format movie nerds are treating like a religious experience. The pitch is simple: stop obsessively refreshing seat maps, let the site stalk openings for you, and sprint when someone cancels. And yes, the sales frenzy is real: the creator says 150,000 people bought tickets on day one, which instantly turned the comments into a mix of applause, envy, and full-blown cinema survival tactics.
The community reaction is the real blockbuster. One camp was immediately cheering — “great work!!” and “This is awesome” energy all around — while another camp basically admitted the seat war has already escalated into bot-vs-bot chaos. One commenter casually revealed they’d built their own script to snag a sweet spot at San Francisco’s Metreon, only to get stonewalled by anti-bot protections and the brutal reality that the theater is apparently running screenings through the night. That turned the thread into a hilarious portrait of moviegoers acting like day traders, except the prize is not stock profit, it’s avoiding Row B.
Then came the skeptical hot take: is this actually rare, or are people just panicking? One commenter wondered why not simply wait a few weeks and let the hype die down. But the mood of the thread says patience is for people who don’t believe their peripheral vision deserves luxury treatment. Others were already asking for England and Europe, because naturally the first response to a niche seat-alert tool is, “Cool, now make it global.”
Key Points
- •The article presents IMAXXING, a service that monitors U.S. 70mm IMAX seat maps for *The Odyssey* and emails users when qualifying seats open up.
- •It states that *The Odyssey* is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX film and describes 70mm IMAX as the film’s native format.
- •The service currently watches about 25 U.S. IMAX 70mm screens over the next 30 days and supports party sizes from one to six.
- •Seat recommendations are based on live seat-map geometry, prioritizing centered seats at comfortable depth and excluding accessible and companion seats from first-release general recommendations.
- •Alert checks increase in frequency as showtime nears, Telegram is available as an optional companion channel, and the article outlines data-retention and unsubscribe policies.