A 1,500-foot line at Lincoln Square is the bill for AMC's 73% online mix

Fans queued overnight outside Manhattan's AMC Lincoln Square 13 for 70-millimeter Imax tickets to "Dune: Part Three," with the earliest arrivals showing up at midnight and a line that by 11 a.m., roughly half an hour before the box office opened, wrapped around the block and further ^[2][3]. That matters because the channel those buyers bypassed is the one exhibitors spent a decade building: AMC's SEC filings show 73% of tickets were bought online in 2025, up from 8.5% in 2013 and 53% in 2020 ^[6].

Read that number the other way and the exposure is clearer. About 27% of AMC's 2025 tickets still moved through something other than the website ^[1], and the online share has only added 20 points since 2020 ^[2] after adding 44.5 points in the seven years before that ^[3]. The residual channel was never retired, but it was no longer the design case. Since 2010, according to Daniel Loria, SVP of content and editorial director at the Box Office Company, no new theater has been built with a box office large enough to absorb this kind of lobby footfall ^[8][11].

The trigger was not general enthusiasm. It was supply plus a broken secondary market. 70mm Imax runs in only about 25 theaters in the United States ^[7], and when tickets for "The Odyssey" went on sale earlier this summer, platforms crashed and resellers flipped seats for $165 ^[4]. Some moviegoers concluded from that episode that buying in person was simply more reliable than competing online ^[5]. Zac Acton, 27, told Business Insider he spent six or seven hours trying to buy "Odyssey" tickets online and used a day off to travel to Lincoln Square instead ^[14]. Jerry Walsh, who failed to get "Odyssey" seats, arrived at 6 a.m. with folding chairs and said, "I'm not going to miss it again" ^[13].

AMC did not offer its own comment to Business Insider, directing the outlet to a post on X from chief executive Adam Aron: "There was much discussion internally ahead of and preparing for the Dune 3 launch. We thought we were ready, but we weren't" ^[12]. That is a capacity admission, not a demand problem.

The scarcity is the whole mechanism, and Loria's counterexample makes the point. This summer's record-breaking "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" did not get the same eventized Imax rollout and produced no comparable scramble ^[9]. "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" ^[10].

The behaviour on the sidewalk was transactional rather than festive. Emmanuel Ruiz and Luis Delcarpio waited with laptops in what Ruiz called "work from line" mode, and Ruiz had already used the lobby kiosks to secure two sets of "Odyssey" tickets ^[15]. "Dune: Part Three" does not open until December, which turns a purchase now into an investment ^[16]. Ruiz compared it unfavourably with the "Hunger Games" midnight premiere: "everybody's here for business" ^[17]. Brandon Herman, 50, who grew up in "Star Wars" prequel and "Harry Potter" queues, was the exception and said he reached the end of the line smiling ^[18].

Watch whether exhibitors treat this as a staffing and queue-management problem for a handful of dates or as a signal about pricing and allocation for constrained formats. Loria's point about box office footprints is the constraint that cannot be fixed inside a quarter ^[11], and the lines remain an anomaly in the wider exhibition business ^[19]. The question for December is whether the next 70mm on-sale is designed around the 25 screens that exist ^[7] rather than around a website that has already crashed once ^[4].