Matt Damon in the Odyssey. Photo Credit: Universal.
Zeus’s Law: never question the viability of a movie because it might be a box office smash in disguise. The right-wing culture war grift could not survive Poseiden’s waters as Nolan’s The Odyssey has officially opened globally to the largest of any Nolan film ever, and yes, that includes the Christian Bale Batman trilogy. This’ll be the primary topic of discussion in the report this week, which comes on Tuesday due to my traveling this weekend. We appreciate your patience.
If it weren’t clear already, The Odyssey has opened at #1. But it isn’t a hollow number one, a la Moana last week. This wasn’t just successful, it has executives at 30Rock, no, not the television show where the Odyssey’s star dated Tina Fey, but the actual NBC headquarters, dancing on the rooftop. The Odyssey is now the third-largest opening weekend in the history of R-rated films domestically, just topping 2017’s It with its $123.5M actuals. The only two films ahead of it are Deadpool movies. Stateside, it’s the biggest opening for Nolan other than his TDK trilogy films. Last week in our look ahead, we noted that Nolan films always overperform their estimates, and this is no different, as it comes over $20M more than the final range of projections. It’s box office was massively expanded by its IMAX shares, something that Nolan has become known for. Batman Begins was the first blockbuster to heavily market itself using IMAX, and its follow-up of The Dark Knight was the first narrative film to utilize the IMAX camera technology. Interstellar and Oppenheimer both heavily utilized the IMAX experience in its marketing. The Odyssey is unique because Nolan became the first to use the new model of IMAX cameras, and even created a camera blimp to be able to shoot on location in caves using IMAX.
It’s also the highest-grossing film in the history of Nolan’s career for global opening weekend, though The Odyssey having yet to open in major markets such as Japan and China is a tell as to the issue with comparing global opening weekends: not every market opens at the same time, artificially subduing a lot of its actual opening weekend appeal worldwide. While DSR/CBC traditionally doesn’t delve into the different markets outside of particular movies where it’s a larger story, notably Michael on its chase to the Billion Jean, this feels like a consequential story. As the culture war loomed, the bad faith grifters made note of its lack of appeal in Greece, where the opening weekend numbers are out: The Odyssey had the highest volume of tickets sold in Greece for an opening weekend since Pirates of the Carribean: The Dead Man’s Chest 20 years ago. To say that the Greeks are enjoying it would be an understatement, and perhaps the discourse surrounding ‘changing Homer’s vision’ should consider that Homer’s vision isn’t available, because every version passed down for 3,000 years has been altered to fit an interpretation, just like the film has. If the spirit of the story rings true, as does the tradition.
The legs on this should be fascinating to watch as it is a very PLF heavy film, but it has IMAX exclusivity for a month until The End of Oak Street, so even with Spider-Man Brand New Day in a few weeks, it should see an inflated continuation, especially considering the 70MM IMAX locations are still sold out for the next three weeks. Furthermore, its Monday gross was the highest Monday for any single film of the year. The word-of-mouth is unsurprisingly excellent, not unlike every other Nolan film. It is the quickest film in Letterboxd history to 1M+ members watched in only six days, shattering the previous record of two weeks, so suffice to say, its 4.4/5 average rating, the 115th highest-rated film on the site, isn’t propped up by a small figure of people having rated it. Its A cinemascore is tied for the highest of Nolan’s career outside of the Batman trilogy, and its verified audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is 97%. Not to mention, its marketing is encouraging multiple watches, and anecdotally, I saw it three times opening weekend: 70MM, 70MM IMAX, and AMC Prime. I traveled from Orlando to Manhattan to specifically see it in 70MM IMAX.
Should it have the same multiplier as the global opening of Oppenheimer, it’ll make in well excess of $1B. DSR/CBC is already calling it: this will be a $1B film, joining two other Universal pictures so far this year: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Michael.
It’s a good time to be Universal, but it’s also a good time to be Anne Hathaway. The Odyssey is the highest-grossing live-action opening weekend of the year thus far, beating The Devil Wears Prada 2, both of which star Hathaway. If you want to watch a movie on IMAX through the end of August, the next film to get an IMAX release stars…Anne Hathaway.
Finishing in second this week is Moana, which is already below $18M domestically for the weekend in only its sophomore weekend. Our verdict from last week is already aging well, and while the hyperlink has already been connected to find the article, the general gist is that the IP isn’t old enough to take advantage of nostalgia, the film doesn’t seem to offer a unique experience, and The Rock doesn’t sell anymore. That latter part got picked up on the latest episode of Jim Cornette’s podcast, Jim Cornette’s Drive-Thru, which can be found here. Thank you to both James E. and Brian Last, but also whoever the reader is that submitted the piece to them.
It performed decently throughout the week, not unlike a lot of family films during this time of year due to school being out for summer. But a ~60% drop without a major family film coming out for a while now that Toy Story 5 and Minons & Monsters have been in theatres for a minute, is not going to save this film. Through its second Monday, it’s still under $200M globally with a $250M budget and $650M breakeven figure, having gotten through the largest part of its box office run.
The aforementioned family movies finished third and fourth this week, respectively. Toy Story 5 made only about $4M less in its fifth weekend than Moana did in its 2nd, despite being in nearly 1,000 fewer theatres and having direct competition in the animation realm. Toy Story 5 is currently sitting at around $960M globally, and should be an easily billion for Disney. But Disney said today that despite the profitabiltiy earlier this year of Hoppers, it was too on the margins, and that’s part of the reason for today’s workforce reductions, specifically at PIXAR. That’s because despite the underperformance of Minions & Monsters, at least relative to the track record of its franchise, it’s well into profitable territory because of Illumination’s knack for keeping budgets down. Maybe that’s what Disney’s looking for in PIXAR? That remains to be seen, but regardless, a $13.6M third weekend for Minions has legged it out to just around $360M, and on an $85M budget, that’s printing money.
The Evil Dead franchise has crashed and ‘burned’ at the box office, as Evil Dead: Burn saw a 66% drop, making only $4.7M. That brings it to a $51M global box office, which should give it enough cushion to not lose money, but it’s hard to call this a hit. It’s hard to say where this one went wrong, as its predecessor was a box office sleeper hit that made triple, and had been well-receieved on streaming. The audience reception here is muted but not lukewarm, perhaps the horror audience going to original films is muting the performance for IP? Regardless, this isn’t a terrible performance but it also isn’t very good.
Six through ten are all holdovers we’ve covered extensively in previous DSR Box Office Reports and making well under $5M, which doesn’t change the stories we’ve been telling. If you want to hear us discuss the reasons Supergirl bombed, Disclosure Day underperformed, audiences became obsessed with Obsession, or the validity of the Young Washington box office, be sure to click the tag at the end of this article that says “Box Office Report.” The big story amongst these holdovers, however, is The Invite. Olivia Wilde’s comeback, a four-hander comedy shot like a stageplay with a lot to say about relationships, made around $4M. This puts its global cume at around $22M, and with a $12M acquisition figure, this may eek out a profit for A24, making it a win for Olivia Wilde after she turned down more money from Netflix to put it in theatres to show that low-budget comedies shot on film could still be a viable venture.
Looking ahead, we’ll actually be looking six months from now first. Avengers: Doomsday dropped its long-awaited first trailer as Robert Downey Jr., the star that built the empire of the MCU, returns to Marvel as Dr. Doom. Releasing tickets in only 1,000 PLF auditoriums yesterday, it made $16.5M already in ticket sales. Is this the return to form Marvel has been hoping for? That’s an angle we’ll explore closer to, but no Avengers film has ever made less than $1B. Spider-Man also saw an increase in tickets sales yesterday, enhanced by the hype surrounding Doomsday, even though Peter Parker reportedly isn’t in Doomsday. While there’s certainly fun releases this week, notably the original cast recording of Hadestown with Eva Noblezada and Reeve Carney and Her Private Hell, a thriller from Drive director Nicolas Refn, Spider-Man is our next big blockbuster. It’s tracking a global opening of half a billion. Basically: it’s a good month to be named Tom Holland, Zendaya, or Jon Bernthal.
Jameus Mooney is an entertainment writer for Comicbook Clique, having covered the entertainment industry for years. You can follow him on Twitter here, and Letterboxd here. You can also listen to his horror podcast, The 2:17 Horror Podcast, at the DeathArts XIII YouTube channel.