Staying Power: “The Odyssey” Sails Through a Historic Second Weekend
The mighty tailwinds of audience enthusiasm powering Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey continue.
In the epic’s second weekend of release, it pulled in a terrific haul of $87 million from 3,943 theaters across North America, the kind of total that would mark a major hit for a film’s first weekend in theaters. Ticket sales dipped a mere 30% from The Odyssey’s truly epic debut, proving yet again that audiences are ready to take a cinematic journey just about anywhere as long as Nolan is captaining the ship.
What makes The Odyssey’s success even more impressive is that the film is rated R, which limits the potential number of viewers to a not insignificant degree. The second-weekend numbers that Nolan’s Homer adaptation just pulled in make it the second-largest sophomore haul for an R-rated movie ever, just behind Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine, which earned $96 million in its second weekend.
Nolan’s film, which stars Matt Damon as the wearied, emotionally wounded Odysseus, has now pulled in $639.6 million globally. Next weekend marks the first fellow tentpole it will come up against, Destin Daniel Cretton’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which stars Odyssey star Tom Holland and Zendaya. Regardless of who comes out on top of this battle, it’s great news for the industry to have two major films with big stars and big audiences in theaters at the same time, especially in usually sleepy August.
“Once or twice a year a movie opens big and then plays for weeks and weeks,” David A. Gross, who publishes the box office newsletter FranchiseRe, told The Hollywood Reporter. “The Odyssey is showing that kind of holding power.”
Universal’s rollout for The Odyssey was smartly steered, making sure audiences understood the incredible lengths Nolan and his cast and crew went to capture a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. It was widely known long before the release—more than a year before, in fact—that The Odyssey was the first film ever shot entirely with IMAX cameras. This feat required changes to the camera to make it quieter, which then necessitated more novel fixes to account for the now quieter technology’s massive size. The Odyssey was also shot largely on location, including on a real boat, a Viking ship called the Drake that the production sourced in Norway, and filmed on the open waters of the Mediterranean, off the Scottish coast in the North Sea, and off of Iceland.
The marketing campaign was a massive success, as premium-format tickets that went on sale a year before the film’s release sold out, and many additional screenings sold out afterward. The Odyssey has now earned $140 million globally in IMAX. To see the film in Nolan’s preferred format, IMAX 70mm, fans have only 41 theaters in the world to choose from. Most showtimes for these theaters are sold out into September.
The Odyssey is leaving the sweet waters of blockbusterdom and sailing into the remote and rare seas of a full-blown cultural event. The film’s expected to remain a sought-after ticket for weeks and even months to come. Nolan’s adaptation has proven it’s a blockbuster. Now, it’s sailing toward something rarer: cinematic immortality, the kind of feat that might make even the gods jealous.
For more on The Odyssey, check out these stories:
How Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” Enchanted Moviegoers & Book Sales—Especially Gen Z
The Horror of Homer: How “The Odyssey” Brought Out Christopher Nolan’s Dark Side
Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” Finds the Monster Within Its Hero
Featured image: Matt Damon (frame left, with bow) is Odysseus in THE ODYSSEY, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
