Oppenheimer fans on Craigslist are willing to spend $100+ for IMAX 70mm tickets

Some Oppenheimer fans in New York City are willing to pay Craigslist ticket sellers hundreds of dollars to get their faces melted off in IMAX 70mm. Hey, you just can’t head to New Mexico, slather on some sunscreen, and witness the awesome power of the atomic bomb in person like you could in 1945!

The fledgling cottage industry sprung up as quickly as the research town of Los Alamos itself. On Monday, a Tweet (is that still the correct term?) went viral for an attached screenshot of a purported Craigslist post titled “70MM Imax Oppenheimer – 8 tickets, perfect center, 4th row – $1,000 (Midtown).” (The original listing appears to have since been deleted.)

“My whole crew unfortunately has a funeral to attend and can’t make this showing of Oppenheimer. It’s at the AMC Lincoln Square 13 for the 70MM Imax theater,” the post begins, before explaining that the eight tickets are linked and must be bought together in one transaction for a whopping total of $1,400.

Now, we have some questions. First, are the tickets selling for $1,000 or $1,400? Either way, if you do the math that’s either $175 or $125 per ticket, respectively. For context, while available IMAX 70mm tickets on the theater’s actual website are sparse, an evening showing will only set you back $26.99, while a matinee costs $21.59. Which brings us to our second question: do the tickets really have to be bought for $1,400? Does the whole crew really have a funeral to attend or is this just an entirely too clever scheme?

If it was a scheme, it was likely a successful one. A general search for “Oppenheimer IMAX” on Craigslist yields dozens of listings not just from hopeful sellers like the above, but also from prospective buyers shouting out their willingness to spend good money on good seats. Many posters chose to keep the amount they would spend vague, based on qualitative factors like the date of the showing or the sight line of the seats. (Fans in this category include one person who identifies as a “big Nolan / physics fan” and another who specifies that they’ve “met Christopher Nolan, and he is awesome” but they, alas, “don’t know him well enough to ask for a ticket.) Bids among buyers that did specify their price range from $80-$150.

But… why?

As The A.V. Club’s Matt Schimkowitz explains, viewing Christopher Nolan’s epic in IMAX 70mm is the only way to ensure that you’ll see the director’s full, un-cropped vision come to life. Nolan and his team shot the film in two aspect ratios: DCI Standard 1.9:1, which any theater can handle, and IMAX Native 65mm (the missing 5mm is used for a strip containing the soundtrack), which can only be seen in full in theaters that can handle such a large reel. Unfortunately for fans who bought into the hype a little too late, there are only 30 IMAX 70mm screens in the world—with just 19 located in the U.S.—so tickets can be hard to come by. Hence, Craigslist.