AMC's digital ticketing system crashed during The Odyssey sales. Now Dune 3 ticket lines wrap around blocks. The infrastructure gap is a risk for its highest-margin format.
The line for "Dune: Part Three" tickets at AMC Lincoln Square 13 wrapped around the block by 11 a.m. Thursday. Moviegoers at the front told Business Insider they arrived at midnight. Some showed up at 2 a.m., others at 6 a.m. with folding chairs. The frenzy follows a similar crush for Imax 70-millimeter tickets to "The Odyssey" earlier this summer, when platform crashes hit the AMC website and resellers flipped seats for $165.
Twenty-something Justin Joseph and Anthony Ortega got there at 7:15 a.m. and scored 70-millimeter Imax seats. They sat on the stairs with their spools of tickets laid out like trophies. Thirty-year-old Jerry Walsh, who missed the Odyssey ticket window, arrived at 6 a.m. "I'm not going to miss it again," he told the publication.
The enthusiasm is limited to a small number of screens. Only about 25 theaters in the U.S. show the 70-millimeter Imax format. Daniel Loria, SVP at the Box Office Company, contrasted the Dune and Odyssey excitement with "Spider-Man: Brand New Day," which dominated Imax screens earlier this summer without generating the same camping-out behavior. "You want to see Spider-Man, you could see Spider-Man," Loria said. With The Odyssey, fans wanted "one auditorium of one specific theater for one specific movie."
AMC CEO Adam Aron acknowledged the ticketing struggle. "There was much discussion internally ahead of and preparing for the Dune 3 launch. We thought we were ready, but we weren't," he wrote on X.
For AMC itself, the ticket hype carries both upside and risk. Eventized Imax 70-millimeter releases create a loyalty halo and social-media buzz that drives foot traffic. But the platform crashes at the Odyssey sale and the persistent lines suggest AMC's digital infrastructure is struggling to match demand for its highest-margin product. At AMC, 73% of tickets were purchased online in 2025, up from 8.5% in 2013 and 53% in 2020, per SEC filings.
Loria pointed out a structural constraint: "Since 2010, very notably, there is no new or even mildly new theater out there that is designed with a massive box office space to accommodate this big footfall in the lobby." Older theaters were built for crowds. Newer ones were not. That mismatch concentrates pressure on a handful of flagship venues when a blockbuster release draws demand to a single format and screen.
The risk is manageable for now. The 70-millimeter Imax crowd is a fraction of AMC's total audience. But a sustained pattern of failed online sales could push more customers toward in-person queuing, which strains the same lobby infrastructure Loria described. If that happens during a wider release cycle, AMC could face a reputation problem that goes beyond the enthusiast crowd.
Aron's public admission that AMC was "not ready" after internal preparation suggests the company is aware of the gap. The Odyssey ticket debacle already showed the consequences of the gap: crashed site, frustrated buyers, reseller profits. AMC has not announced any new ticketing system or queue-management upgrade.
For now, the lines remain a positive signal. They mean that premium theatrical exhibition still carries enough cultural weight to pull people out of their homes hours before dawn. But every enthusiast who camps out because they could not buy online is a vote of no confidence in AMC's digital ticket system. The question is how many such votes the company can collect before the infrastructure starts to matter.
The Dune line itself reflects a larger reversal. Advance digital ticketing was supposed to solve the problem of fans sleeping on sidewalks. Instead, the eventization of 70-millimeter Imax has brought the problem back, concentrated on a format that AMC itself signals as premium. The company's highest-value customers are the ones most underserved by its core sales channel.
AMC's stock trades on a different set of variables – debt, cinema attendance recovery, the broader box office calendar – but the Dune ticket line is a reminder that operational frictions at peak events can compound. A few more platform crashes during big releases, and the goodwill from the camping-out stories turns into frustration from the much larger audience that never got a seat.
Emmanuel Ruiz, 27, who scored both Odyssey and Dune 3 tickets from the AMC lobby kiosk, told Business Insider that the last time he camped out for tickets was the "Hunger Games" midnight premiere. "I feel like it's pretty different because Hunger Games, everybody was dressed up. Everybody was really excited. Here, it's just like everybody's here for business," he said. Business, not fandom. That suggests the line has become a logistics exercise, not a pure celebration.
AMC's Alpha Score sits at 28/100, labeled Weak, in the Communication Services sector. The score reflects the company's ongoing debt load and the slow recovery of cinema attendance. The Dune line, by itself, moves none of those fundamentals. But it does show that AMC still holds something of value: a physical venue where a group of strangers, many of them carrying laptops in work-from-line mode, spend a Thursday morning to secure a seat for a movie that opens in December. That kind of demand is not a problem AMC has to fix. But the system that serves it needs to keep up.
Zac Acton, 27, spent six or seven hours trying to buy Odyssey tickets online. To avoid a repeat, he took a day off work and traveled to AMC Lincoln Square. "It's pretty insane, but it's also cool," he said.
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