Exclusive | Inside NYCs 3 a.m. movie mania the sleep-wrecking, ticket-scrambling IMAX craze: That is insane

At 2:45 a.m.on a recent weekday, the AMC Lincoln Square on Manhattan’s Upper West Side showed none of the usual signs of winding down for the night.  Hours after the city that never sleeps had mostly gone home to bed, a crowd of eager New Yorkers was standing in line to buy buckets of popcorn. Groups of happy moviegoers were hanging out in the lobby after earlier showings of “The Odyssey,” chatting, while others headed up the escalators, Red Bulls in hand, to the theater’s IMAX auditorium — pumped to watch a nearly three-hour Christopher Nolan film in the pre-dawn hours. The real-life scene was strange enough — particularly in 2026, long after the last of the all-nighter grindhouses of 42nd Street bit the dust and midnight premieres became a quaint relic, and, of course, not all that many years after the movie theater was deemed dead.

Which is not entirely wrong, considering the AMC Kips Bay location will close later this year thanks to the property owner’s decision to early terminate the lease.Stranger still were the lengths people were willing to go to snag a seat — with some paying thousands on the resale market. It’s official: film culture has entered its witching-hour era — with people rearranging sleep, work, transit, caffeine and even common sense just to experience a film on the right screen, like this one.And at theaters like the AMC Lincoln Square — people are fighting to get in.Joe Colón, 29, a marketing specialist living in the city, slept from 9 a.m.to 4 p.m.

the day before his late-night screening of “The Odyssey” and spent the evening out on the town, arriving at the Upper West Side theater 15 minutes before the 3 a.m.show began. “My faith never wavered,” he told The Post afterward, when asked if he’d remained awake throughout.

“It also helps that it’s pretty hard to fall asleep in the biggest IMAX theater in the country with some of the loudest speakers I’ve ever heard.”Colón said he’d seen peo...