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 on Thursday across a few thousand screens.
The Odyssey held strong on Saturday, taking in $41.66 million, down only 17% from Friday and previews, bringing its domestic weekend total to $124.5 million. That’s the best domestic opening of the year so far, 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 lands as the fourth-biggest R-rated opening of all time, trailing only Deadpool & Wolverine ($211.4M), Deadpool ($132.4M), and Deadpool 2 ($125.5M).
Globally, the film has now crossed $264.1 million, officially Nolan’s biggest worldwide opening ever, ahead of The Dark Knight Rises’ $249 million. The international side alone contributed $139.6 million across 73 markets, 12,700 locations, and 25,600 screens, also a career-best foreign debut for Nolan. It’s 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.
Breaking down the international numbers market by market: the UK led the way with $17.4 million, Nolan’s second-biggest opening there ever, narrowly behind The Dark Knight Rises and well ahead of Oppenheimer. France delivered $13.7 million, Nolan’s biggest-ever opening in the market, comfortably above Oppenheimer, with the country’s first-ever 70mm IMAX site, Pathé Odysseum Montpellier, selling out every show. Italy opened to $11.5 million, far surpassing Oppenheimer and outpacing the entire lifetime runs of both Dunkirk and Tenet: Nolan’s biggest opening day and weekend ever in the market. Australia brought in $9.3 million, the biggest opening of the year there and Nolan’s second-best weekend in the country.
Germany added $8.1 million, another second-best Nolan weekend, with Thursday alone marking the market’s biggest-ever IMAX opening day, beating Avatar 3. India delivered $7.2 million, Nolan’s best-ever opening there and Universal’s biggest three-day opening of all time in the market, already surpassing the lifetime totals of The Dark Knight Rises, Dunkirk, Interstellar, and Tenet combined. Mexico posted $7 million, Nolan’s second-best opening in the market. Spain brought in $5.2 million, a new opening record for Nolan there. And Brazil closed out the major markets with $4.8 million, nearly double what Oppenheimer managed and another all-time best for Nolan in the country.
Universal’s domestic distribution chief called it a genuinely rewarding weekend, pointing to the visible excitement in theatres alongside the numbers, and crediting Nolan with delivering an epic on a scale rarely attempted, backed by audience reactions running well beyond strong reviews alone.
By chain, AMC led the way domestically with more than $23 million, followed by Regal at over $17 million, Cinemark at $11.7 million, and Canada’s Cineplex at $7.4 million.
Universal is calling those previews at $17.6 million, the best preview number of 2026 so far, ahead of Toy Story 5’s $17.5 million. It is a genuinely remarkable thing for a three-hour R-rated epic about a man rowing home to his wife and son to have surpassed a family-friendly sequel with two decades of franchise power behind it.
The breakdown of last night’s gross: 25% from IMAX digital screens, 25% from exhibitor-owned premium large format screens (Dolby, Screen-X and the like), 5% from IMAX 70mm (quite incredible given how few screens there are in the US and the world), and another 3% from standard 70mm. Overall, 58% of the film’s entire preview gross came from large-format presentations. This isn’t 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.
The Odyssey has also grossed $21.26 million from overseas markets through Thursday, putting the estimated worldwide gross at $38.86 million. The reviews are just as overwhelmingly positive as the film’s box office outlook: 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and 89% on Metacritic.
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 this week: according to Athinorama, The Odyssey has broken presale records at Village Cinemas in Greece. In the actual country, the actual myth is actually from, among the actual descendants of the people who apparently should have been offended on Nolan’s behalf, it is instead breaking records.
And it is not just Greece; despite many people swearing off Nolan’s The Odyssey for engagement farming and ragebait, the film is going to gross around $200 million worldwide in its opening weekend.
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. Tracking has the film opening to $85–100 million domestic and another $110 million overseas, across 73 territories and 22,700 screens. Advance sales alone already sit at $40 million domestically.
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.
Oppenheimer, Tenet, Dunkirk, Interstellar, Inception, the Dark Knight trilogy, his 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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Ofcourse, none of it will register with the man in the bedroom. He’ll watch the number cross $200 million this weekend, find a way to explain it somehow — paid critics and it will tank second weekend theories— and move on to whatever’s next in their long list of things to be furious about.