The Odyssey Sold Out Before It Existed
Universal spent recent weeks watching wide releases underperform. Disney’s live action Moana slowed to a $20 million second weekend, putting its 10 day total at $82.7 million. Other titles opened soft too. Then Christopher Nolan’s telling of Homer’s epic opened. The film pulled in $51 million on opening day from roughly 3,900 North American theaters, including Thursday preview numbers, and closed its first weekend at $120.5 million domestic.
Original studio estimates had the film landing closer to $90 million to $100 million. Some early tracking put it in the mid $80 million range. The actual opening cleared all of those numbers.
Third Place Has Never Looked This Good
$120.5 million puts The Odyssey behind only The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises in Nolan’s domestic career, and those are Batman movies with built in audiences. Among everything else he has made, including Oppenheimer and Interstellar, this is the biggest opening by a wide margin. Oppenheimer opened to $82.4 million. The Odyssey passed that by nearly $40 million in three days.
Globally the film made $257.8 million across its opening weekend, the largest global opening of any Nolan film, ahead of The Dark Knight Rises’ $249 million. The budget was $250 million.
The Seats Were Gone Before Anyone Had Seen a Frame
The Odyssey is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX cameras, and more than a dozen IMAX 70mm screenings sold out a full year before the movie opened, before a trailer had dropped and before any reviews existed. People committed a Friday night twelve months in advance based on a format and a director’s name.
The film went on to land a Certified Fresh 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and an A CinemaScore, meaning the audiences who showed up left satisfied.
What Actually Got Sold This Weekend
Matt Damon leads as Odysseus, with Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as Telemachus. Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Elliot Page, Jon Bernthal and John Leguizamo round out the cast. Universal reportedly spent around $125 million marketing the film worldwide.
A three hour R rated adaptation of a 2,800 year old poem is a hard sell on paper regardless of budget. Those 70mm screens sold out a year ahead of release. People planned a Friday night around a specific kind of moviegoing, on film, in a format built for it, before they had any evidence the movie would deliver.
