The Odyssey is on track for third place opening, behind two cartoons
Christopher Nolan’s $250 million epic is projected to open around $120 million domestically — a record-setter in several categories, but still third for the year behind Toy Story 5 and Super Mario Galaxy. With that price tag, the real test isn’t the opening. It’s the legs before Spider-Man lands July 31.
Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey is having a huge opening weekend. It’s also, depending on how you squint, a slightly smaller one than a year of sold-out hype implied. Both things are true.
Here’s where the numbers stand as of Saturday morning, with the weekend still in progress.
The Odyssey’s opening, by the numbers
The Odyssey pulled $17.6 million in Thursday previews — the best preview night of 2026, edging out Toy Story 5. It followed that with a $51.2 million Friday (previews included) from Universal, which was already enough to outgross the entire opening weekend of Nolan’s Interstellar.
As of Saturday, tracking has the three-day domestic total landing around $120.5 million. Globally, it’s eyeing roughly $257.8 million — the biggest worldwide launch of Nolan’s career, ahead of both Oppenheimer and The Dark Knight Rises. The film earned an A CinemaScore and a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.
That’s a genuinely big opening. Just keep the projection caveat in mind — the full weekend won’t be final until Monday.
Yes, it’s a record — several of them
Give The Odyssey its due, because it earned a stack of records honestly.
It’s the biggest live-action opening of 2026. It’s the year’s biggest R-rated debut, well ahead of horror hit Backrooms. It’s Universal’s biggest R-rated launch ever, passing Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s the biggest domestic opening for any Matt Damon-led movie. And it’s Nolan’s best global launch, period.
The R-rating point matters most. A three-hour, R-rated adaptation of a Greek epic poem opening north of $100 million is not a normal thing to happen. Most studios wouldn’t greenlight that sentence, let alone bankroll it. On those terms, it overperformed.
But it’s third for the year, behind two cartoons
Now the part the hype machine would rather skip.
For all the records, The Odyssey is the third-biggest opening of 2026, and the two movies ahead of it are animated family films: Toy Story 5 at $159.6 million and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie at $131.7 million. A $250 million Christopher Nolan spectacle with one of the most stacked casts ever assembled is opening behind a Pixar sequel and a video game movie.
And it’s not just animation. Among live-action tentpoles, a $120 million opening is strong but hardly singular — big superhero movies have been launching in this range for years. Which is worth remembering when the marketing frames this as an unprecedented event.
The campaign leaned hard on scarcity — IMAX 70mm screens that sold out a full year in advance, a handful of tickets changing hands like concert seats. Fandango called it the year’s top preseller. All of that built an expectation of a singular, biggest-thing-of-the-year moment. What actually arrived is an excellent opening that lands in third place.
That IMAX 70mm sellout involved only 34 screens nationwide. Scarcity on a tiny number of premium seats made demand look bottomless. The wider release is doing great business — but “sold out a year early” was always a story about the fanciest screens, not the whole country.
The $250 million problem
Which brings us to the number that actually decides whether this is a triumph: the budget.
The Odyssey cost a reported $250 million to make, before a dollar of marketing. That’s a staggering figure, and it means a $120 million opening — huge as it sounds — is a starting line, not a finish. Big-budget tentpoles generally need to clear two to three times their production cost worldwide just to break even once theaters take their cut and marketing is paid off. For a quarter-billion-dollar movie, that’s a long road home.
Last year’s Superman is the cautionary tale. James Gunn‘s reboot — a $225 million superhero tentpole, cheaper than The Odyssey — opened to about $125 million, a hair above where Nolan’s film is landing. And it still finished its entire worldwide run around $619 million. Under a billion. It was 2025’s biggest superhero movie and a genuine win for Warner Bros. and DC, and it never came close to the billion-dollar club that the “monster hit” label tends to imply. A bigger opening on a smaller budget, and the ceiling was still $619 million.
The good news for Universal is that Nolan movies are famous for legs. Oppenheimer opened to $82 million and hung around for months. If The Odyssey holds anything like that pattern, the opening becomes a footnote and the total tells the real story.
Why the next two weeks matter more than the opening
Here’s the part that’s genuinely well-played by Universal: The Odyssey has a clear runway. There’s no major wide release next weekend — studios deliberately left the lane empty — which hands Nolan’s film roughly two weeks to feast before the next giant arrives.
That giant is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, opening July 31. And it’s coming for the exact real estate The Odyssey depends on — the IMAX and premium large-format screens that drove more than half of Nolan’s opening-night gross. When Spider-Man swings in, those screens flip.
So the opening was never really the question. The Odyssey isn’t a flop; it’s a record-setter with an asterisk-sized budget. The question is whether it can hold the premium screens for the two-plus weeks it has them, and bank enough before Sony‘s web-slinger repossesses the IMAX houses.
Odysseus needed ten years to get home. Universal needs The Odyssey to hold the good screens for about three weeks. We’ll know by August whether the journey pays off.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Deadline (Anthony D’Alessandro, July 18, 2026) — the $120.5M Saturday-AM three-day projection, $17.6M previews, premium-format breakdown, record notes
Variety (July 17–18, 2026) — $51.2M opening day, the earlier $90–100M pre-weekend projection, $250M budget, Interstellar comparison
The Hollywood Reporter (July 18, 2026) — global $257.8M projection, R-rated records, IMAX share, the cleared July 24 weekend and Spider-Man July 31 dating
Forbes (July 17–18, 2026) — upward revision from earlier estimates, $120M–$137M domestic range, Nolan global-launch comparisons
Variety / Boxoffice Pro (July 2025) — Superman’s $125M opening and $225M budget; Box Office Watch — Superman’s ~$619M worldwide final total