Tickets for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey are being resold for up to five times their face value in South Korea, as demand for IMAX screenings has prompted the country’s film council to begin collecting reports of suspected ticket scalping.

IMAX tickets at CGV Yongsan I’Park Mall in Seoul, one of South Korea’s most sought-after premium cinema venues, have appeared on secondhand trading platforms for more than 100,000 won (£53), compared with a face value of 17,000 to 22,000 won (£9 to £11.6) depending on the day and screening time, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily.

Some listings have gone considerably higher, with SBS News reporting that three consecutive seats for an evening screening on 14 August were being offered for almost 300,000 won (£158).

Scalpers had begun advertising tickets before the film even opened in South Korea on 5 August. Some sellers were found to be offering more than 10 tickets for a single screening, raising suspicions that automated programmes were being used to secure large numbers of seats before they were resold, according to The Korea Herald.

The rush for tickets has been driven in large part by the unusual way The Odyssey was made, as it is the first film to be entirely shot on IMAX cameras. While South Korea has 27 IMAX theatres, the CGV Yongsan auditorium is the only IMAX screen capable of showing the film in its full 1.43:1 aspect ratio without cropping, making tickets there particularly coveted by audiences keen to see The Odyssey as Nolan intended.

The demand has been strong enough to send some moviegoers beyond Seoul in search of a seat.

Shin Myeong-ho, 25, travelled from Seoul’s Seongbuk district to Daejeon on 8 August to watch The Odyssey in IMAX, and told The Chosun Daily that he would have had to wait “at least two weeks” if he wanted to watch it in Seoul.

For fans trying to book through the usual platforms, the result has been a race for a limited number of seats before they disappear into the resale market.

The Korean Film Council, known as KOFIC, has now stepped in and announced that it will accept reports of suspected ticket scalping on an ongoing basis, covering premium formats including IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and 4DX.

The council is asking audiences to report tickets being resold above face value on secondhand marketplaces and social media, as well as cases in which sellers appear to have made unusually large bookings using macro programmes.

Reports can be submitted by email and should include the film title, cinema, screening date and time, and seat information, along with evidence like screenshots of resale listings and conversations with sellers.

The Odyssey has been enjoying an unusually strong run in South Korea as the country’s cinema industry continues its recovery from the prolonged decline in theatrical attendance following the pandemic.

Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Greek epic retained the top spot at the weekend box office in its second week and passed five million admissions on its 13th day of release, according to Sports Chosun. It hit the milestone five days faster than The King’s Warden, the hugely successful Korean historical drama that became the country’s first film in two years to pass 10 million admissions and eventually drew more than 16 million viewers.

The problem is not unique to cinema in South Korea, where high-demand entertainment tickets have long been a target for touts. In 2018, tickets for Avengers: Infinity War’s IMAX 3D screenings were being resold for 110,000 won (£58), around five times their original price, while similar resale activity followed Avatar: The Way of Water in 2022 and Dune: Part Two in 2024.

Concert tickets have seen even more extreme mark-ups; when BTS tickets went on sale for the group’s 2026 concerts in Goyang, tickets with an official price of up to 264,000 won (£140) were listed for as much as 10.37m won (£5,490) on StubHub, more than 39 times face value, with other seats being offered for up to 900,000 won (£476) on a Korean secondhand marketplace, according to The Korea JoongAng Daily.

South Korea has announced tougher anti-scalping rules set to take effect from 28 August, but they will cover concert and sports tickets rather than cinema tickets.

The new rules will ban the resale of performance and sports tickets for profit, regardless of whether automated programmes were used to obtain them, and allow fines of up to 50 times the sales amount.