Project Hail Mary was an IMAX phenomenon.
Project Hail Mary was the year's first major cinema draw. In NYC, 96% of tracked PHM IMAX showtimes filled to 90%+ capacity, averaging 97.6% peak fill. The standard format showtimes in the same building averaged just 47%. The consensus became that seeing PHM in IMAX was the only worthwhile viewing experience.
Where viewers believed the best seats were.
Your viewing experience of an IMAX film corresponds to where in the auditorium you sit. We explored a demand map of where users created monitoring events, hoping for a cancellation to score the best viewing experience.
AMC's famed Lincoln Square 13 has its own gravitational pull.
Lincoln Square IMAX accounted for the bulk of all alerts created. We mapped the seats monitored against their turnover rate. Brighter = more demand.
Seat J21
Dead center of the IMAX sweet spot. J21 was monitored 418 times across 569 alerts — the single most-monitored seat at Lincoln Square. The four seats around it (J22, K21, J20, J23) each cleared 400 monitors apiece. This 2×2 block is the most contested real estate in American cinema.
AMC's San Francisco and Los Angeles IMAX flagships tell a similar demand story.
Despite smaller demand pools, SeatDrop is still able to uncover the most competitive seats in NorCal & SoCal.
Are people right in their assumptions?
Demand tells us what people believed were the best seats. Lock tells us which seats people refused to let go of. The same map, with cancellations subtracted out — bright now means held in a vice grip across the entire run.
Investigating Lincoln Square's deadlock seats.
A heat map of pure persistence. This visualization weights every seat by its scarcity: the brighter the glow, the more frequently it was monitored and the less likely it was ever surrendered. These are the truly competitive spots, the ones held in a vice grip.
Seat J19
Demand crowned J21 as the consensus pick. Reality crowned J19. Monitored 412 times across 83 showtimes — and never opened up. Zero cancellations. Whoever booked this seat for Project Hail Mary cancelled their other plans before they cancelled the seat.
The Coastal Grip: SF vs. LA.
While smaller demand pools provide fewer cancellation events to track, the data reveals a familiar story: where vice-grip patterns exist, they are just as intense. The most monitored seats in both locations still held the crown even accounting for turnover.
So how hard was it, really?
Even with a heat map of every contested seat, the question remains: what did it take to sit in one? The data on turnover, timing, and format premium answers it bluntly.
1 in 4 PHM showtimes never opened a single seat.
Each tick is one tracked Lincoln Square IMAX showtime, in chronological order. For 26% of shows we observed zero turnover across the entire monitoring window — the seat map never moved.
And when seats did open? Just 2.6% on average.
Across all 84 tracked Lincoln Square IMAX showtimes, an average of just 2.6%1 of seats ever turned over per showtime, meaning a viewer had to rely on 12 of 480 seats ever becoming available.
Only 12 of 480 seats could be relied on to turn over per showtime, on average.
Same building. Same movie. ~22× harder for an IMAX seat.
At Lincoln Square, IMAX showings of Project Hail Mary peaked at 97.6% capacity on average. The standard auditoriums in the same building, showing the same movie, peaked at just 47%2.
Cancellations spiked in the final hour.
Per-hour density was ~64×3 higher right before showtime than 3+ days out. But the median lead time of 13.5 hours meant openings were still distributed the entire run-up to showtime.
When the windows opened, SeatDrop was watching.
Across 759 PHM alerts, SeatDrop identified real time cancellations for 38% of all PHM monitoring events.
39% of our users received notification of at least one window of opportunity. This translated to ~16 confirmed bookings for users who otherwise would not have been able to see the movie.
Note: other monitoring events may have been watching seats or showtimes where no cancellations met their criteria — which is why no alert would fire.
Booking confirmations launched mid-April; actual bookings to PHM via SeatDrop are expected to be higher.
SeatDrop users are monitoring the biggest releases of 2026.
Join them & never miss a movie.
- 1.Averaged across all tracked Lincoln Square IMAX showtimes; turnover counts unique seats that opened at least once during the monitoring window.
- 2.Peak fill is the highest occupancy ratio observed for a showtime during monitoring, not the fill at showtime start. Sample limited to standard-format Project Hail Mary showtimes at AMC Lincoln Square 13.
- 3.Density compares cancellations per hour, normalized to bucket width. Time buckets vary in duration, so raw event counts would understate how concentrated final-hour activity actually is.