With Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey earning more in North America during its second weekend ($90 million) than Nolan’s blockbuster hit Oppenheimer made in its opening frame ($82 million), it’s clear the sky’s the limit for where The Odyssey might end up.
“My expectations were high, and I did think this was gonna be maybe the second biggest movie of the summer behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but maybe that’s not true at this point,” says The Ringer’s The Big Picture host Sean Fennessey. Worldwide, The Odyssey has earned more than $640 million; by this time next week, it will have surpassed the entire North American gross of Oppenheimer, which almost hit $1 billion in the summer of 2023. All that for a movie that had received backlash from right-wing circles, led by Elon Musk, due to Nolan’s diverse casting choices.
“It’s so funny that there was some sense that there might be some small culture war impact on this movie’s box office, which was always kind of BS, but now it just feels absolutely absurd,” says Fennessey. “Nolan is in rare air now. There aren’t really many people you can compare Nolan’s filmography and box office to at this point.”
As Fennessey tells Sean McNulty, Nolan’s peer group is limited to the biggest directors ever — people like Cecil B. DeMille, James Cameron and Steven Spielberg.
“I don’t know if he’ll have as long and deep a career as Spielberg; I don’t know if his movies are gonna mean as much to people over the history of time as Spielberg’s movies,” Fennessey says. “But just in terms of Hollywood movie making, he is very much the alpha right now.”
Nolan has always been one of the industry’s most reliable filmmakers thanks to his franchise work with the Batman movies and hits like Interstellar and Inception. But Fennessey says it was Oppenheimer opening alongside Barbie in 2023 (to create the portmanteau Barbenheimer) that might have sent him into the stratosphere.
“Nolan, who always releases movies in the middle of July, was a little bit frustrated by having to go up against Barbie, but those dates were set pretty clearly. And it obviously turned out to be wonderful for both films. And I do think it helped eventize Nolan movies even further,” says Fennessey. Combined, the two movies grossed more than $2.4 billion worldwide.
“It did create this sense of anticipation and then FOMO if you weren’t participating in Barbenheimer. And I think that really aided with this movie,” he adds. “I was at a party on Saturday night, and if you hadn’t seen The Odyssey, you had fucked up.”
