Alien Covenant Superticket – Odeon’s Superhype?

Alien Covenant Superticket – it sounds like a great idea! But is it?

Get to your local Odeon for next Wednesday, April 26th, and it looks like they’re showing 261 minutes of Alien-related goodness. The 2012 Prometheus movie, followed by… around 15 minutes of Alien Covenant. On the night, that is.

You will get to see the new Ridley Scott movie, but you’ve got to wait 15 days to see that, until Thursday, May 11th, which is only one day before it’s out in all cinemas, anyway. And you’re paying £20 for the ticket, which is not cheap when one of the films came out a few years ago.

I’m all for double-bills where slightly older films are used as a teaser to something new, such as in 2016 when I went to see The Avengers and Captain America: Winter Soldier, starting around 6.30pm in the evening, leading to Avengers: Age of Ultron airing at midnight (well, at 12.30am once the bloody adverts and trailers had finished!), but those two films only cost a fiver for the pair!

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In addition, Prometheus looks great in IMAX 3D, with its specifically-formatted 1.90:1 widescreen ratio (I described in my review how this will look different to the traditional 2.35:1 version), but here, it’s just in 2.35:1. Plus, while it would’ve been rightly presumed that Alien Covenant would’ve been shown in 3D, for no reason yet explained, it’s in 2D only – everywhere.

This is a shame because after Ridley shot all three of Prometheus, Exodus: Gods and Kings and The Martian in 3D, rather than just doing the third dimension in a post-production conversion like most cheap-ass films gunning for the extra buck (including all the Marvel movies), he’s said after the first how much he loves shooting digitally, but now hasn’t bothered with 3D for the latest film. Is 3D dying out yet again?

The IMAX screens just seem to be showing this in 1.90:1 (apparently in 70mm for the four in the UK which have that facility, but Ridley likes to shoot digitally so I doubt that IMDB ‘fact’), and the trailers were all in that ratio, so I wonder if that’s how it’ll be shown in all cinemas, as was the case with Tomorrowland: A World Beyond.

Then again, while I’ve not yet seen Exodus, I have seen The Martian in both 3D and 2D and despite the space setting, it wasn’t exactly crying out for 3D as a necessity.

Plus, some people seem to be able to use the ridiculously limited Limitless service, whereas a lot of people can’t. This is so well-through out(!)

Here’s the full programme for “Alien Day” on April 26th:

18:30 – Doors open/pre show begins
18:55 – Prometheus begins (124 mins)
20:59 – Break (10 mins)
21:09 – Ridley Scott intro (1min)
21:10 – Alien Covenant sneak peak – (14 mins)
21:24 – Noomi Rapace/Michael Fassbender intro – What happened to Dr Shaw, exclusive footage (4 mins)
21:26 – Alien Directors Cut (117 mins)
23:23 – Programme finishes

Anyhoo, if you want to be confused, book your ticket online, pay your £20, select your seat, watch a five-year-old film, then see a clip of the new one which you’ll see soon anyway and which you’d rather be watching on that night, including a few brief interview snippets, then an even older film you’ve seen countless times, and then get kicked out after two hours or so, only to have to come back 15 days later and find a different seat in a different screen, since they don’t even know yet whether the latest movie will be showing in the same screen – yes, great planning, Odeon!