Jon Bernthal’s Billion Dollar Blockbuster Officially Topples a 130-Minute Tom Cruise Action Epic at the Box Office

There’s a decent argument that Jon Bernthal has become Hollywood’s most reliable supporting actor. He’s done it for years across The Wolf of Wall Street, Baby Driver, Ford v Ferrari, and The Accountant films, all while keeping the Punisher alive through three separate Marvel regimes. In 2026, that instinct for picking the right rooms has paid off in a way nobody could have reasonably planned, because Bernthal now appears in both of the year’s two biggest movies.

He’s Frank Castle in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, sitting north of $2.4 billion, and he’s Menelaus, the King of Sparta, in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. That second film has now climbed past $1.7 billion worldwide, and somewhere on its way up the charts it left behind the movie that was supposed to be the modern gold standard for theatrical staying power: Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick.

‘The Odyssey’ Overtook ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ at The Box Office

Maverick finished its original run at roughly $1.496 billion worldwide, per Box Office Mojo, and even a 40th anniversary re-release this past May only nudged the lifetime total to about $1.503 billion. For four years, it stood as the defining example of how a crowd-pleaser with great word of mouth could out-earn franchises twice its size, a 130-minute PG-13 machine engineered for repeat viewing. The Odyssey has now cleared that number by roughly $200 million while being almost everything Maverick wasn’t. It adapts a 3,000-year-old Greek poem and cost a reported $250 million before marketing.

The Odyssey has passed Jurassic World to become Universal’s biggest release ever, and its climb has also carried it beyond The Lion King (2019), The Avengers, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Barbie, and Deadpool & Wolverine. Beating Deadpool & Wolverine made it the highest-grossing R-rated film in history, and it’s now the first R-rated title to reach $1.7 billion, a threshold that seemed borderline fictional for adult-rated fare not long ago. It also ranks as the third-biggest non-franchise film ever, trailing only Avatar and Titanic.

Jon Bernthal Landed Roles in 2026’s Two Biggest Movies

The next target is Zootopia 2 at $1.867 billion, about $146 million away, and while catching a Disney animated juggernaut is never a given, the film’s remarkably slim weekly drops since its July 17 opening make it a live possibility. There’s a mild irony in Maverick being the film that got overtaken here, since Cruise and Nolan have long been the two loudest evangelists for the big screen experience, and Cruise famously turned up at Oppenheimer screenings to cheer on the competition. One suspects he won’t mind losing this particular spot on the chart.