'Odyssey' IMAX tickets fetch up to 300,000 won on resale platforms

"Buying 'Odyssey' Yongsan IMAX seats — center block, row 30 — for Wednesday morning showing, 300,000 won." That post, spotted on the secondhand marketplace Joonggonara, captures a growing frenzy around one of the hottest tickets in Korean cinema right now.

Listings to buy or sell tickets for "Odyssey" at prices far above face value have been multiplying on secondhand trading platforms.

The surge reflects the film's runaway success and the near-impossibility of securing a seat at select IMAX theaters where the experience is considered essential. With all CGV IMAX seats sold out through Aug. 25, a gray market has taken hold — a remarkable turn at a time when cinema attendance has been in steep decline due to the rise of OTT services such as Netflix.

Signs of bulk buying followed by resale at inflated prices have emerged across multiple platforms, yet no legal mechanism exists to stop it.

"Odyssey," directed by Christopher Nolan, drew about 2 million admissions within six days of its opening, industry sources said Wednesday, and the box-office momentum has flooded secondhand platforms such as Karrot and Joonggonara with listings for tickets to the CGV Yongsan IMAX auditorium — widely known among Korean moviegoers as "Yongamak."

As of Wednesday morning, a search for "Odyssey Yongamak" on Joonggonara returned 319 posts, while "Odyssey IMAX" yielded 524 — all from users looking to buy or sell tickets for screenings at Yongamak or other CGV IMAX venues.

"Odyssey" was shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, and word of mouth has spread that an IMAX theater is the only way to see it as intended — making Yongamak tickets virtually impossible to obtain through normal channels.

As of Wednesday, every seat at Yongamak through Aug. 25 was either sold out or down to roughly five remaining, and those last seats were wheelchair-accessible spots in the front row closest to the screen.

The scarcity has driven prices to extraordinary levels. Sellers routinely ask between 40,000 and 50,000 won ($35) per ticket at the low end, with some demanding as much as 300,000 won. Both sellers offering and buyers willing to pay premiums of hundreds of thousands of won have appeared. Standard CGV IMAX tickets range from 17,000 to 22,000 won, meaning resale prices represent markups of nearly 20 times face value.

Cases of suspected bulk ticket hoarding have also surfaced. One seller reserved a total of 20 seats across Aug. 19 to Aug. 25 and was offering them for resale.

Under current law, however, directly penalizing movie ticket scalping is not possible. An amended performing arts act set to take effect Aug. 28 imposes surcharges of up to 50 times the sale price on scalpers of concert and sports tickets, but movie tickets — governed by a separate law on the promotion of films and video content — are explicitly excluded from its scope.

A bill to amend that film law to address ticket scalping is pending in the National Assembly. In the meantime, secondhand platforms say they have little recourse beyond monitoring.

A Karrot spokesperson said the company takes action against professional resellers who post repeatedly — including hiding their listings and suspending their accounts — but added that it cannot penalize users "simply for selling at a high price" in other cases.

A Joonggonara spokesperson said the platform has "no uniform transaction restrictions in place regarding movie ticket resales" and has not yet received any cooperation requests from relevant authorities, but added that it is "continuously monitoring market conditions and the potential for user harm" related to movie ticket resales.