Well, how could this be? I was told that The Odyssey is going to flop because YouTube dislikes are the most accurate representation of the opinions of moviegoers around the world.
As you read this article, somewhere, a man in his thirties is typing the words, “This is what the fall of the West actually looks like,” beneath a poster for a film about a guy trying to get home to his wife. Now, that man could be a trillionaire with deep-seated insecurities or a broke culture warrior sitting near the top of the list of people the trillionaire’s company is supposed to prey on. Neither of them has read Homer. They will never read Homer. But somehow, both of them know, with total conviction, exactly what Homer would have thought about the casting. Post it. Retweet it. Screenshot it for the group chat. Sail on, brave scholar.
On Twitter, or X, or whatever we’re calling it this week, a small but very loud group of people has decided The Odyssey is a betrayal of Western Civilisation. The casting is wrong, apparently. Someone cast an actor whose skin tone offended the historical accuracy of a story about a man turned into a pig by a witch.
Boycotts have been announced. Thinkpieces have been drafted about the death of culture or Hollywood by people who could not tell you the name of Odysseus’s dog, but since they cannot write, they are making a 90-second reel about it.
Sadly, all this boycott was rendered quite meaningless when the previews started rolling at 2 pm last Thursday across a few thousand screens. Universal called those previews for The Odyssey at $17.6 million, the best preview number of 2026 so far, ahead of Toy Story 5’s $17.5 million. The Odyssey’s weekend total of $124.5 million was not only the best domestic opening of the year so far, but also Matt Damon’s biggest opening ever as a lead, the biggest opening for a Universal R-rated release, and Nolan’s third-best domestic debut of his career. It also landed as the fourth-biggest R-rated opening of all time, trailing only Deadpool & Wolverine ($211.4M), Deadpool ($132.4M), and Deadpool 2 ($125.5M).
Poseidon may have spent the entire poem hurling storms at Odysseus, while Elon and his goons have branded Nolan an “anti-white racist.” Both mean little to the general public, and the box office for the film so far reflects that the world has been kinder to this duo. After a $264.1 million global opening, which was officially Nolan’s biggest worldwide opening ever, ahead of The Dark Knight Rises’ $249 million, The Odyssey has not shown any signs of losing its steam. Monday brought in $18.7 million domestically, the best Monday of the year so far. The film added another $21 million and $18 million on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, bringing its domestic total to $181 million by midweek.
Fueled by advance sales for IMAX 70mm and other premium formats, The Odyssey is now heavily favored to hold its second-weekend drop under 50%, maybe even under 40%, with a weekend floor of at least $70 million. It is quite incomprehensible that it is a chance at a genuinely absurd milestone: a second domestic weekend that outright beats Oppenheimer’s entire $82.4 million opening weekend from 2023. IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond, for his part, isn’t hedging at all: the film, he says, “will play in IMAX 70mm locations for months, and we’re already recording sellouts at these locations deep into the film’s run.”
The Odyssey is not a film people are catching on a Tuesday matinee out of habit. This is a film people are actively driving further, paying more, and planning around, purely for the format. Nolan’s decade-long, faintly stubborn insistence on shooting for these screens has apparently trained an audience to go find them.
With an equally solid reception across the board globally, the film looks all but certain to clear $500 million worldwide by the end of its second weekend, and could be sitting somewhere near $700 million by the time Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens next weekend. The Odyssey is set to have achieved all of this before Nolan has even opened in the markets that love him quite dearly. China, Korea, and Japan are still a few weeks away, and his last two films, Oppenheimer and Tenet, grossed a combined total of $100 million and $105 million in these markets, respectively.
Which brings us back to the men still furious on Twitter about historical accuracy in a story that has Cyclops and Sirens. Their entire case, remember, rested on the idea that this adaptation was some kind of insult to Greek heritage, an affront the ancient world itself would apparently have taken personally if it were still around to log on.
So it’s worth taking a look at the Greek Box Office as well: according to Athinorama, The Odyssey not only broke presale records at Village Cinemas in the country but it also opened there with a record-breaking 151,415 admissions, brushing straight past the Football World Cup for its attention. This was the country’s best box office opening in two decades since Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
If you ever needed proof of how most of the internet is just people in a room being needlessly reactionary and shouting onto their own wall and calling the echo a majority, this counts as one.
The film so far has recorded Universal’s biggest-ever opening in 11 different markets, and Nolan’s personal best in 48 countries, including France, Italy, India, Spain, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Poland.
The reviews are just as overwhelmingly positive as the film’s box office: 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and 89% on Metacritic.
A nearly three-hour non-franchise film is the biggest ticket in town this weekend around the globe? You would have to take your mind back to James Cameron’s Avatar and Titanic, to reminisce about the last time somebody else, apart from Nolan, managed to pull off something this remarkable.
This man has spent the best part of the last two decades doing something almost nobody else in Hollywood can do anymore: sell a film on his own name and sell it big, which is quite reminiscent of Spielberg in his prime and the way studios used to sell a movie on a movie star.
That’s the thing about a Nolan film that has become increasingly clear: nobody remotely competes with him for top billing, not even people who’d headline anything else they touched. Beloved as Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, and Robert Pattinson are, most people are pouring in because Nolan’s name sat above the title, and that’s a currency almost nobody else in the industry gets to trade in anymore— not DiCaprio, not Cruise, certainly no actor currently drawing breath. All these actors themselves want to come play in his sandbox. He is the star. Everyone else, however brilliant, is just lucky enough to be invited.
Nolan’s films have grossed over six billion dollars and won eighteen Oscars. If The Odyssey manages to gross at least $506,350,412 worldwide, Nolan would have surpassed Peter Jackson in the all-time box office standings, becoming the Fourth Highest-Grossing Director ever.
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Of course, none of it will register with the man in the bedroom. They’ll watch the number cross $500 million this weekend, find a way to explain it somehow — paid critics and it will tank s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶ w̶e̶e̶k̶e̶n̶d̶ third weekend theories— and move on to whatever’s next in their long list of things to be furious about.
Note: The current top five domestic earners of the year so far are: Toy Story 5 ($434.6M), The Super Mario Galaxy Movie ($429.8M), Michael ($372.3M), Project Hail Mary ($344.1M), and Obsession ($259.2M).
Oppenheimer, Nolan’s previous film, opened at $82 million domestic and legged out to $330 million on a 4x multiple with nothing glamorous to sell it beyond three hours of extremely serious men in rooms discussing physics and guilt. His latest epic is most likely to surpass all these films in the top five in the coming weeks.