There are few directors working today who can attract large crowds to the theater with just their name alone. Christopher Nolan is one of them. One of the reasons why The Odyssey is one of the most anticipated films of the year is the fact that it’s Nolan’s latest work, arriving a few years after Oppenheimer became a box office smash that won Best Picture. Excitement for The Odyssey has been steadily brewing ever since the project was announced; the prospect of Nolan bringing one of fiction’s most legendary stories to life with a star-studded cast is extremely tantalizing. Based on the incredibly high demand for IMAX tickets, it seems like The Odyssey is going to do very well at the box office, and now there’s a range for its opening weekend.
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According to Deadline, The Odyssey is currently projected to gross somewhere between $80-100 million domestically over its first three days. That’s a wide range, the high end of which would mark a surprising first for Nolan. None of the director’s non-Batman movies have opened with $100+ million at the domestic box office. In Nolan’s career, only two of his films have earned that much out of the gate:
| Movie | Opening Weekend (Domestic) |
| Memento | $235,488 |
| Insomnia | $20.9 million |
| Batman Begins | $48.7 million |
| The Prestige | $14.8 million |
| The Dark Knight | $158.4 million |
| Inception | $62.7 million |
| The Dark Knight Rises | $160.8 million |
| Interstellar | $47.5 million |
| Dunkirk | $50.5 million |
| Tenet | $9.3 million (COVID release) |
| Oppenheimer | $82.4 million |
The Odyssey Highlights the Power of Christopher Nolan at the Box Office
Since experiencing his breakout in the 2000s, Nolan has been one of Hollywood’s highest-grossing directors (his films have earned over $6 billion collectively worldwide), but The Odyssey would be an impressive accomplishment even by his lofty standards. It was always expected it would do well commercially, but a few months ago, a $100 million opening might have been out of the question — not just because of Nolan’s track record, but because The Odyssey is a three-hour, R-rated fantasy epic. On paper, the R rating limits the film’s potential audience, and a lengthy run time typically limits the number of screenings theaters can book daily.
That said, it isn’t all that surprising that The Odyssey‘s box office tracking is this strong at the start. Besides Spider-Man: Brand New Day (which is already making a killing from pre-sales alone), Nolan’s latest is the premier cinematic event of the summer movie season. A number of this year’s traditional tentpoles have underwhelmed at the box office, with Supergirl being the latest to disappoint. There should be a massive appetite to see a big-budget genre film on the biggest screen possible, and it looks like most moviegoers have been saving their dollars for the one-two punch of The Odyssey and Spider-Man in July. Toy Story 5 scored the biggest opening of the year last week, but people haven’t been lining up in droves to see Hollywood’s live-action offerings this summer yet.
Even if The Odyssey debuts on the low end of the projections and matches Oppenheimer, it would further cement Nolan’s status as a box office force with few equals. These days, James Cameron is arguably the only auteur who’s a bigger draw. A younger Steven Spielberg routinely broke all-time box office records, but his more recent films haven’t reached those levels. Some of that has to do with the projects Spielberg is tackling in his elder years, but the sci-fi movie Disclosure Day has earned $88.5 million domestically as of this writing. There’s a scenario where The Odyssey tops that in a single weekend. Disclosure Day opened stronger than anticipated, but it’s no Odyssey.
These estimates for The Odyssey are coming out a few weeks before the film premieres. It’ll be interesting to see if the numbers fluctuate in one direction or the other as we get closer to release. Reactions and reviews for The Odyssey haven’t been published yet, so there’s potential for word of mouth to impact the box office projections. For the most part, The Odyssey should be critic-proof in its opening weekend; the anticipation is too great (particularly for those coveted IMAX screenings). But if The Odyssey is hailed as the latest masterpiece from Nolan, perhaps it could exceed a $100 million opening.
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