The Odyssey is the FOURTH biggest R-rated opening, behind all 3 Deadpool movies
Christopher Nolan’s epic landed the fourth-biggest R-rated opening in history. All three Deadpool movies opened bigger, it edged out It by less than $100,000, and adjusting for inflation would knock it down several more spots. It’s still a huge hit. It’s just not the record-smasher the coverage suggested.
Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey had a monster weekend. Genuinely. A three-hour, R-rated Greek epic opening north of $120 million is not a thing that’s supposed to happen.
But the headlines have been doing some heavy lifting, and the final numbers are a little more modest than the Sunday estimates that got quoted everywhere.
What the final numbers actually say
Per Box Office Mojo, The Odyssey finished its opening weekend at $123,502,900 domestically. That’s the fourth-biggest R-rated opening in history.
Worth noting the number itself moved. Studio estimates on Sunday put it at $124.5 million, and that’s the figure most outlets ran with. Actuals came in about a million lower, which is normal and boring and also means a lot of the coverage is quoting a number that no longer exists.
Every Deadpool movie opened bigger
Here’s the ranking, and it’s a little lopsided.
The top three R-rated openings are all Deadpool movies. Deadpool & Wolverine pulled $211.4 million in 2024. The original Deadpool did $132.4 million in 2016. Deadpool 2 did $125.5 million in 2018.
Then The Odyssey. So Nolan’s epic is fourth, and the three films ahead of it are all the same wisecracking guy in a red suit. Ryan Reynolds owns this list.
The margin is $99,481
Now the fun part. The Odyssey isn’t comfortably fourth. It’s fourth by a hair.
Sitting at number five is 2017’s It, with $123,403,419. The gap between them is $99,481. On a $123 million weekend, that’s a margin of about eight hundredths of one percent. Roughly 8,000 tickets, out of more than ten million sold.
That’s why Deadline’s Sunday coverage hedged that the film would land fifth if the estimates held. It didn’t quite hold. The Odyssey squeaked past a clown movie from 2017 by the cost of a used car.
Adjust for inflation and it slides further
The bigger asterisk is inflation, because raw dollars flatter new movies by default. Ticket prices in 2026 are dramatically higher than they were in 2003 or 2016, so the same number of butts in seats produces a much bigger number today.
Box Office Mojo doesn’t publish an inflation-adjusted version of this chart, so this is back-of-napkin math on our end. But run those grosses through average ticket prices and the picture shifts.
The Matrix Reloaded sold roughly 15 million tickets in 2003 on a $91.8 million weekend.
The Passion of the Christ moved about 13.5 million in 2004 on $83.8 million.
It and Deadpool 2 each sold somewhere close to 14 million.
The Odyssey, at 2026 prices, sold something in the neighborhood of 10 million. Which would push it out of the top five entirely, down to roughly seventh or eighth by tickets sold.
Treat those figures as estimates, not gospel. The direction is what matters, and the direction is down.
The premium-screen wrinkle
There’s one more thing working in the movie’s favor that nobody’s adjusting for: The Odyssey leaned hard on expensive seats.
More than half its opening came from IMAX and premium large-format screens, where a ticket can run $25 or more instead of the roughly $12 national average. That’s great business, and it’s also why the gross outruns the attendance. Sell fewer tickets at a higher price and you get a bigger headline for a smaller crowd.
So if anything, the ticket-count comparison above is generous to it.
None of this makes it a flop
Let’s be clear, because this is context, not a takedown. The Odyssey is a legitimate smash.
It’s the biggest live-action opening of 2026. It’s Nolan’s biggest global launch ever at $264 million worldwide, ahead of Oppenheimer and The Dark Knight Rises. It’s the best opening of Matt Damon‘s career and the biggest R-rated debut Universal has ever had. It got an A CinemaScore and a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. It beat every projection it was handed.
And unlike the three movies ahead of it, it isn’t a superhero sequel built on a decade of setup. It’s a 2,800-year-old poem with no marketing hook beyond the director’s name. Getting ten million people into theaters for that in a single weekend is genuinely remarkable.
The record just isn’t the one the coverage implied. Fourth place, by less than a hundred grand, on a list topped three times by the same guy in spandex, in a year when tickets cost more than they ever have.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Box Office Mojo — the Top Opening Weekends by MPA Rating (R) chart, including The Odyssey’s $123,502,900 final, It’s $123,403,419, and the three Deadpool figures
Deadline — the Sunday estimate of $124.5M, the fourth-vs-fifth hedge, and the premium-format share of the opening
Rotten Tomatoes / ScreenRant — the 95% critic score, the A CinemaScore, and the Matt Damon and Universal records
Dark Horizons — the $264.1M worldwide opening and Nolan’s international record