Universal Pictures
The Odyssey is hitting theaters this weekend and is projecting to be a milestone box office release. With global projections coming in at $200 million, that would be the biggest opening of Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed career outside his Batman trilogy.
The impending box office haul for The Odyssey comes following a dragged out release cycle that saw the likes of Elon Musk and others crusade against the film as being “woke” due to choices made by director Christopher Nolan, particularly Academy Award-winning Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o being cast as Helen of Troy.
Musk also said that Nolan had “lost his integrity” and that he cast certain roles in order to qualify for certain Academy Awards diversity guidelines (this is untrue).
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is tracking to make over $200 million at the box office during its opening weekend, more than Oppenheimer‘s opening weekend
The backlash to The Odyssey wasn’t just an online phenomenon, either, as Nolan himself addressed it in a recent interview, saying that criticism of the project is “irrelevant” until it’s been seen.
Already being hailed by the critics as another masterwork of cinema from Nolan, audiences look set to positively receive it, too, as the film is tracking to make over $200 million at the global box office in its opening weekend.
For context, that would be the highest non-Batman opening of Nolan’s career. His last release, the Best Picture-winning Oppenheimer, made $174 million in its opening weekend and over $976 million overall, a remarkable feat for a three-hour-long, half black-and-white biopic about a nuclear physicist.
If The Odyssey — slightly shorter and more action-packed than Oppenheimer, stars Matt Damon and is an adaptation of one of the most famous stories in human history — is already outpacing Oppenheimer, then it’d be on course to make over $1 billion at the box office, which would completely undercut predictions of Nolan’s decline.
the chuds are seething rn https://t.co/WWbaNTvmMl
— luca (@lucam8a) July 15, 2026
The Odyssey ticket sales has been crashing every ticket distributors’ servers for the last hour and folk were really on here saying it was gonna “flop because Nolan went woke” 😭😭✌🏽 pic.twitter.com/xwnAJop3es
— Big Boss (@LordBalvin) June 4, 2026
“But the online grifters were telling me that it was gonna flop and destroy Nolan’s career,” one tweet read.
“But Elon musk told me no one is going to see it because it was not historically accurate,” another joked.
The highest-grossing movie of Nolan’s career is 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, which made $1.08 billion at the global box office. His seminal 2008 film The Dark Knight also crossed $1 billion at the global box office, becoming the first-ever superhero film to do so.