Anticipation for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was so high that several IMAX 70mm screenings of the movie sold out a year in advance, before Universal had even released the movie’s trailer.
So it should be no surprise that the opening weekend tally for Nolan’s Oppenheimer follow-up exceeded even its lofty expectations, earning more than $124 million in North America alone and $264 million worldwide.
“The great thing we did see is that sense of FOMO, fear of missing out,” says Fandango’s Shawn Robbins, director of movie analytics and the writer of the Box Office Theory newsletter, of the film’s walk-up business.
“This generated a lot of conversation,” he adds, noting that The Odyssey audience skewed young (55 percent under 35), making Nolan one of the few filmmakers able to straddle generational lines at a broad scale. “You saw a combination of strong premium screen sales, IMAX sales, but also people just getting to the theater like, ‘We want to see this, we’re hearing great things. Maybe we’ll go back and see it in IMAX later, but we’ll see it however we can today.’”
About the only negative outcome this weekend for the box office was that The Odyssey didn’t have a running mate. In 2023, the combined power of Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie pushed U.S. box office to more than $311 million for the opening weekend. This past weekend, without a counterprogram option to pair with The Odyssey, the total U.S. box office was $194 million.
“I know Barbenheimer is a one-off — lightning in a bottle. But this is a male-skewing film. It’s in IMAX. There does seem to be an opportunity here,” says Sean McNulty. “This is prime time. This is summer movie season. Every weekend’s pretty precious; to take a weekend off to not counterprogram with a female-skewing, wide-appeal film, just feels like a missed opportunity.”
“This is a risk-averse industry,” adds Shawn. “Studios don’t want to put out an expensive movie in between Nolan and the next Spider-Man film (out July 31).”
Still, while the opening weekend audience overindexed in men (56 percent), Shawn thinks it could change in the weeks ahead. “Certainly with Anne Hathaway‘s incredible performance, the love story aspect of it all — I think, in that way, maybe we could see that female audience show up for The Odyssey over time — especially as word of mouth kicks in.”
