On today’s episode of the Daily Variety podcast, Box Office Corner, Variety’s Rebecca Rubin breaks down Universal Pictures’ The Odyssey’s staggering $264 million worldwide box office haul. The timing couldn’t have been better for Imax, a large exhibition company that delivered more than 50% of its opening weekend sales.
Anticipation was so strong for Nolan’s 2023 Oppenheimer sequel that there was little doubt that the $250 million production budget would be a blockbuster hit. But the final numbers show how reliably The Odyssey was able to mobilize audiences around the world.
“What’s most impressive is the fact that this movie had such a huge opening weekend for an R-rated sword-and-sandal blockbuster. Christopher Nolan is the only director who could pull off a movie like this on this budget and justify the studio spend,” Rubin says. “He’s really cemented his place as a brand at the box office. He’s one of the very rare directors today who can get people to go see a movie just because he’s releasing a new movie. It doesn’t matter what the genre is or even what kind of movie it is. People just want to see what he makes next.”
Rubin points out that the opening weekend audience was about 55% male, and the majority of the audience was young for this genre of film.
“People joke that it’s the quintessential dad movie,” Rubin says. “But what was really important to me was that 50% of the audience was between the ages of 18 and 34, which means he’s got a really young audience. I think if this had been in the hands of a different director, it could have been a much older-biased movie. I love Matt Damon. He’s more of a Gen-X star. A lot of the cast is millennials, so it might not have gotten that much of a younger audience. But[Nolan]really motivated it, and that’s the difference between having a decent opening weekend and having a phenomenal opening weekend — he was able to get an audience of all ages, which will really help this movie in the coming weeks.”
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