How Much Money Will “The Odyssey” Make At The Box Office?

Can review bombing and racist trolls stop Christopher Nolan’s mythological epic from cracking a billion dollars?

Matt Damon and Zendaya in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Image via Universal Pictures.

At the time of writing this in early July 2026, only one film has cracked over $1 billion at the global box office this year, which is Universal/Illumination’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Assisted by the long Juneteenth weekend, Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 5 recently opened to the biggest U.S. domestic opening of the year. It also managed to hold strong in its second weekend and keep DC Studios’ Supergirl from cracking the number 1 spot. Unless the fifth entry in the first ever CGI animation franchise experiences a record dropoff, it will also cross the $1 billion mark in the very near future.

But are there any other movies coming up that have a good chance of hitting those numbers? Maybe something live action, something not for kids? Long gone are the days when studios could just retool their existing IPs and simply expect the cash to come flowing in, as Disney’s recent Star Wars misfire just proved in rather embarrassing fashion.

There are three upcoming summer blockbusters that could potentially hit $1 billion, and the two most likely candidates both star Tom Holland and his (now-confirmed) wife Zendaya. Disney’s live action Moana remake has an ok shot but I think somewhere in the $500-$700 million range is more likely. Spider-Man: Brand New Day will almost certainly be Marvel Studios’ biggest film since their last Spider-Man release in 2021, given that Spidey is and always has been the most marketable superhero in the world. But Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a bit more of a wild card.

The movie is going to do huge numbers no matter what, as has already been confirmed by record-breaking ticket presales. IMAX 70mm screenings went on sale (and promptly sold out) in July 2025, a full year before the film’s release. AMC Theatres recently reported that the film’s first-day presales are better than any movie since 2022. At the beginning of June, Gizmodo published a fascinating article about a reporter attempting to purchase tickets for the film in IMAX 70mm and receiving at least eight different kinds of error messages from AMC’s website. The day after that was published, People reported that some people were already reselling tickets to The Odyssey for up to $10,000.

Image via Universal.

So is there anything that could potentially stop this from being the biggest film of the summer, if not the entire year? Yes, actually. Two major factors: ratings and racism. Let’s start with the less groan-inducing of the two.

In America, Nolan’s epic has received an R rating (requiring parent or guardian for anyone 17 and under), which translates to a 15 in the UK, although its trailers were classified as 12a. The official reason given by the MPAA for the R rating is for “violence and some language”, meaning the battle scenes are likely to be more intense than any action Nolan has put on screen before. This rating is quite unusual for a summer blockbuster, especially a big-budget fantasy film opening squarely in the middle of July.

2023’s Oscar juggernaut Oppenheimer was Nolan’s first R-rated film since Insomnia in 2002. Oppenheimer was indeed a box office smash hit, generating just under a billion dollars worldwide. However this was largely due to the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, one of the first major cinematic events in a post-COVID world to actually convince large amounts of viewers to go watch new films in a theater.

Barbenheimer was also a complete accident; the unexpected byproduct of a feud between Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros., the studio where he had been making hit movies for almost two decades. During COVID, Warner execs made the controversial decision to put all their 2021 movies on streaming on HBO Max the same day they came out in theaters. This not only ushered in a new era of streaming spinoffs and franchise slop, but it led Nolan to publicly call HBO Max “the worst streaming service” and take his next project to Universal instead.

[embed]How Christopher Nolan’s Beef With Warner Bros Saved the 2023 Box Office 2024 could sure use a Barbenheimer moment right about now.medium.com

Universal granted Oppenheimer the same mid-July release date that Nolan had been using for almost every movie since Batman Begins, and WB gave Barbie the same release date just to piss him off. It resulted in an unexpected boost in attendance for both films, with Oppenheimer making $82 million in its domestic opening weekend. The film stuck around in theaters for months and did huge numbers in IMAX screenings, which accounted for a significant portion of its final domestic haul of $330 million. Three years and two Oscars later, Nolan is releasing The Odyssey on the same weekend in July, but without the Barbie hubbub surrounding it.

Deadpool & Wolverine opened exactly one year and one week after Oppenheimer and shattered the box office records for R-rated films, grossing a whopping $211 million in its U.S. opening weekend. But the previous two record holders for R-rated openings were the previous two Deadpool movies.

Besides other Nolan films, the best point of comparison for The Odyssey would obviously be Troy, Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 adaptation of Homer’s other epic. Ironically, Nolan came very close to directing the Iliad adaptation himself, twenty years before he would go on to helm its sequel. As the director confirmed in late 2025, “I was originally hired by Warner Bros. to direct ‘Troy.’ Wolfgang [Petersen] had developed it, and so when the studio decided not to proceed with his superhero movie [‘Batman Vs Superman’], he wanted it back.” Nolan then of course went on to make a Batman movie instead.

Troy, also rated R in the states and 15 in the UK, opened to $47 million domestically and ended up doing $500 million worldwide on a $175 million budget. It starred the trio of Eric Bana, Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom who were all at the peak of their movie stardom, backed by an ensemble of both veteran character actors and attractive up-and-comers. There were some rumblings of a sequel adaptation of The Odyssey starring Sean Bean who played Odysseus in Troy, but Petersen went on to direct a Poseidon Adventure remake instead and only made one other film in 2016 before passing away in 2022.

Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” (2023). Image via Universal.

If not for the staggering presale numbers, a fairly reasonable expectation for The Odyssey’s opening weekend would be somewhere between Troy and Oppenheimer, so in the $60–70 million range. But recent tracking from Deadline puts it between $80–100 in its opening weekend, higher than either of those other R-rated films.

There is of course that other issue. The whole “why are there Black people and trans actors in this Greek historical epic” discourse. If you want to read some pieces on Medium offering different points of view on that whole fiasco, Nikos Papakonstantinou recently published a good piece in Fanfare about his thoughts on the issue as a Greek person, and Andrew Jazprose Hill published another one here in Counter Arts providing his analysis of the white identity in relationship to Homer’s epic from the perspective of a Black person. Fanfare editor Simon Dillon also recently wrote another related piece about the generally obnoxious nature of Christopher Nolan fandom and how it exacerbates these casting “controversies”.

I don’t have a ton to contribute to that particular corner of the discourse, so I would encourage you to check out those pieces instead. I am a white man and I am a huge fan of both Nolan and Greek myths and I kind of… don’t care who is playing who. I have no Greek blood myself but I have Greek family members and I have been to Athens six times in the past ten years. As far as I can tell my Greek family members are not outraged about the cast of this film because they are adults and they have kids and jobs and they don’t have time to be arguing with men on the internet about the casting of a fictional story. The events of The Iliad may be somewhat rooted in history, but The Odyssey is almost certainly entirely made up.

Nolan is typically great at casting, and I have spent a decent amount of time breaking down his casting habits, as you can see in the little piece of data analysis I have linked below (which I will soon update to reflect the casting of The Odyssey).

[embed]Which Actors Have Worked With Christopher Nolan the Most? He may not be able to see color, but he sure has an eye for casting!medium.com

I have generally tried my best to avoid much of the online back and forth about the casting of the film, but from what I understand, trans actor, author and advocate Elliott Page is not even playing the character of Achilles that so many people were furious about. And even if that was who Page was playing, a key part of the Achilles myth is that he pretended to be a woman to try and get out of fighting in the Trojan War, so that would honestly be a pretty clever piece of casting for Nolan to pull. But don’t tell Elon Musk that.

Whether any of this has a significant effect on the film’s box office remains to be seen. Racist and “anti-woke” review bombing campaigns will almost certainly take place, but my suspicion is that this film is quite literally too big to fail. It’s possible that recent box office bombs like Supergirl and Masters of the Universe may have been partially affected by white men organizing online to boycott and or/review bomb them.

But much like those anti-immigrant protestors in the UK who were recently spotted buying Indian food in the middle of a white nationalist march, I fully expect many of the same online trolls who are freaking out about Lupita Nyong’o’s casting to be seated in an IMAX theater in a few weeks time. They might go and write a bad review and call it the worst movie ever to exist, but we all know they are still going to pay to go see it.

Universal made the interesting decision to skip “influencer screenings” for the film, which is probably at least somewhat motivated by their desire to not allow “manosphere” critics to try and tank the movie. But it is probably mostly because Christopher Nolan, the current president of the DGA and the most powerful director alive, doesn’t own a cell phone and doesn’t care about people who make their livings on a cell phone. This has not stopped Fox News from running articles implying the screenings were cancelled because of “growing backlash” towards Nolan for not being “historically accurate”.

Image via Universal

I think we’re looking at the highest grossing R-rated film since Deadpool & Wolverine (1.3 billion worldwide), even if it doesn’t quite reach those same numbers. With Spider-Man: Brand New Day opening only two weeks later, it’s true that The Odyssey will soon have far more family friendly competition coming down the line fairly quickly. But a little double feature action is no stranger to Christopher Nolan.

The early buzz from critics is that The Odyssey is pretty damn good, and the IMAX marketing has been churning for months now. The rating might slow things down a little bit, but so many tickets have already been sold that even if kids are getting turned away from the opening night screenings, that money is already in the bank.

Nolan’s latest may very well solidify him as the second director in history (following James Wan) to make billion dollar hit movies at two separate studios. If The Odyssey doesn’t hit a billion, it will come damn close. In addition to potentially outgrossing Oppenheimer, it also has a real shot at being a huge Oscar film as well. Even without acting noms, I imagine at the very least VFX, Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Score nominations are inevitable.

I’m sorry to have to break the news to Andrew Tate, but I think we have one of the biggest hits of the year on our hands. There is a non-zero chance it ends up as Nolan’s highest grossing film ever, beating 2012's The Dark Knight Rises (1.085 billion globally). Even if it is outgrossed by the two upcoming Marvel Studios flicks, The Odyssey is going to break several records for both R-rated films and IMAX theaters. Not even the gods can stop that.