In The Odyssey, Odysseus must find his way home to save his wife from a horde of suitors who’ve overstayed their welcome.
Seems that Christopher Nolan’s movie did something similar this weekend.
All would-be cinematic newcomers fled the field at the sight of Nolan’s nearly three-hour epic, leaving a bevy of holdovers to do their best to woo moviegoers into their theatrical clutches. But The Odyssey wasn’t having it: The film sailed to an estimated $124.5 million in North America and slew the competition something awful. Indeed, The Odyssey earned more than the rest of these cinematic suitors combined.
The $124.5 million The Odyssey is a high-water mark for Christopher Nolan non-sequel debuts, sprinting past the director’s previous high of $82.5 million (courtesy Oppenheimer). The Odyssey did just fine overseas, as well—banking $139.6 million in international markets to give it a colossal worldwide haul of $264.1 million.
Nothing in theaters came close to matching The Odyssey’s box-office onslaught, but Moana proved to be the best of the rest. Disney’s much-maligned live-action remake braved the theatrical waters and managed to earn another $19 million stateside. That pushed its overall total to $82.1 million. Many films would be happy to haul in that kind of cash, but for Moana, the island of profitability still lays way off in the distance.
As of Monday morning, Minions & Monsters and Toy Story 5 are locked in an epic struggle for third place. Both peg their weekend estimates at $14.8 million in North America, and we’ll have to wait for the receipts to be counted before we can call the bronze medal. But for Toy Story 5, where it finishes is perhaps beside the point: With the weekend’s haul, the Toy Story sequel cleared $430.9 million domestically—pushing it past The Super Mario Galaxy Movie as the year’s top-grossing flick.
Meanwhile, Evil Dead Burn has been sputtering. The horror sequel earned $5 million to finish fifth this weekend. The movie suffered a precipitous weekend-over-weekend drop and has earned less than $24.2 million in its two weeks of work. Might we hope that the movie’s performance means the franchise itself may be extinguished? Remember, only you can prevent never-ending horror sequels.
2 Responses
I’m no Christopher Nolan fanboy. Some of his movies have been disappointing. So I approached “The Odyssey” with a bit of trepidation. But I have to say, he really knock this one out of the park, and I’m not going to fault him for taking a three year hiatus from filmmaking, as he says he plans to do. Sure, he could have stuck very strictly to the source material, including a lot more gore not to mention Odysseus’ year-long sexual romp with Circe. But that would have made for a MUCH longer and unmarketable film. Like Peter Jackson and his “Lord of the Rings” movies, Nolan made some hard choices in order to craft a convincing epic tale. It’s already outgrossed “Disclosure Day.” Again, this is an R-rated movie based on a Greek epic and it’s close to three hours long. Only Nolan could have made this into a box office guarantee. I thought it was absolutely magnificent.
I also highly enjoyed The Odyssey. Cramming through the book and finishing it right before the movie came out gave me a really interesting perspective on a hero who was much more outright likable in the film than in the book.
Side note, as someone who loved the Super Mario Galaxy movie much more than its predecessor and has moral qualms about supporting Michael Jackson, I’ve been sweating watching box-office returns, even as I think Toy Story 5 is about to zoom past the both of them in a few weeks. And next week we have our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. I’m more hyped for that than for Doomsday.