It’s been fourteen years and five films since Christopher Nolan scored his last billion dollar hit at the box office with The Dark Knight Rises. Now however, in news that at this point will surely come as a surprise to approximately nobody, Nolan has scaled that billion-dollar mountain once more, with Variety reporting that the British auteur’s Homeric epic The Odyssey has just sailed past the major milestone in a frankly astonishing three weeks flat.
With Spider-Man: Brand New Day swinging into cinemas just last week and landing a record-shattering $932 million opening weekend, it was always going to be interesting to see whether the summer’s other Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jon Bernthal starring blockbuster would stifle or slow The Odyssey‘s ticket sales at all. What actually happened instead was that the two movies seemed to semi-Barbenheimer each other, leading to the US’ single best ever box office weekend. And the good news for Nolan’s first movie since his Oscar winning Oppenheimer isn’t looking likely to end anytime soon, either.
In the next few days, The Odyssey is expected to surpass The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises‘ lifetime grosses and officially become Nolan’s biggest movie ever. And in six days’ time, this critically and commercially triumphant take on Homer’s 3,000 year old homecoming tale — Trojan Horses, Cyclopes, Sirens, Circe and all — will open in the world’s second-biggest moviegoing market, China, where 800 IMAX screens and thousands more standard multiplex canvases await. Plus, of course, there’s the small matter of most IMAX screens around the world remain booked and busy well into September as the current celluloid revival continues to pull in film buffs en masse globally. All of which is to say that it doesn’t take a pair of wise eyes (Athena’s eyes) to see that The Odyssey‘s, er, Odyssean run is nowhere near its end just yet. Long live the bricks-and-mortar cinema experience!
