To the surprise of no one, Christopher Nolan’s new movie The Odyssey is making a lot of money. Universal had predicted that the adaptation of Homer’s epic poem would make around $80 to $100 million at the domestic box office on its opening weekend, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Instead, it’s heading for a domestic haul of $120.5 million, with a global tally of $257.8 million.
Globally speaking, that means that The Odyssey will have the highest-grossing opening weekend of any Christopher Nolan movie. Its closest competition is 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, which made $249 million on its opening weekend; 2008’s The Dark Knight, which made $198 million; and 2023’s Oppenheimer, which took in $180 million.
Domestically, The Odyssey will have the third-biggest opening for a Nolan film, behind The Dark Knight Rises ($160 million) and The Dark Knight ($158 million). It is Nolan’s biggest domestic opening weekend for a movie that isn’t part of the Batman franchise, and as mentioned, it’s his biggest global opening weekend ever.
In terms of the global box office, The Odyssey is having the best debut weekend for a live-action feature this year. Only two animated films are ahead of it: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie ($372.5 million) and Toy Story 5 ($312 million). Those movies are both family-friendly affairs that parents can bring their kids to, so it was always going to be difficult for an R-rated adventure movie like The Odyssey to match them. Right now, The Odyssey has the second-highest grossing opening weekend for an R-rated movie ever, behind only 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine ($233.3 million). It’s Universal’s biggest-ever weekend launch for an R-rated film.
The Odyssey is the first movie to ever be filmed entirely with IMAX 70mm film cameras, meaning it will look especially spectacular in Premium Large Format (PLF) movie theaters. So it makes sense that the movie took in $30 million for IMAX screens in North America, a quarter of its domestic haul. An additional $22 million was spent on IMAX screenings internationally.
The Odyssey cost $250 million to make. That is an enormous budget, but considering the strength of its opening weekend, there seems little doubt that it will make a profit. It may well join The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Michael as movies from 2026 that have made over $1 billion. Maybe it will even become the highest-grossing movie of Christopher Nolan’s career. To do that, it will have to eclipse The Dark Knight Rises, which has a global total of $1.085 billion.
Word of mouth is likely to be strong, since reviews from both critics and audiences are excellent. The only damper on the movie’s success is a bizarre online backlash concerning some of Nolan’s casting choices, but clearly that isn’t stopping people from seeing the movie in droves.
- Release Date
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July 17, 2026
- Runtime
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172 Minutes
