Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan has another triumph on his hands with The Odyssey, which is already his biggest critical hit, his biggest hit when it comes to audience reviews, and the biggest global opening of his 25-year career.
Previous to this weekend, Nolan’s biggest global opener was 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, which grossed $249 million. The Odyssey brought in $264.1 million. That’s $124.5 million domestic plus another $139.6 million overseas.
Break-even, which is likely around $600 million, seems assured. Word of mouth is as good as it gets for The Odyssey, which means it will have a good run and probably a lot of repeat business. Then there’s the fact Nolan has no real competition until Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens at the end of July. Both Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey star Tom Holland and Zendaya, so they might be the first married couple in history with the number one and number two box office hits on the same weekend.
Obviously, the uproar over Nolan’s casting decisions had no effect whatsoever on the box office. As I’ve mentioned before, you can’t bet against a filmmaker who is his own brand, his own franchise, has a perfect (non-COVID) box office record, and just won a ton of Oscars for a three-hour, black-and-white biopic about a guy most people have never heard of that made nearly a billion dollars.
Nolan enjoys two things almost everyone in Hollywood not named Sandra Bullock and Leonardo DiCaprio does not have, and that’s audience goodwill and the audience’s trust that they will choose decent projects.
People’s frustration with the one-way-street when it comes to Hollywood race-swapping is perfectly understandable. And people have a right to protest the injustice of this. Regardless of politics, though, a movie will always succeed and fail based on its appeal, and the appeal of a Christopher Nolan movie is undeniable. He delivers. He always delivers, and people know that.
In that way, Nolan is like James Cameron, another director the masses trust to deliver entertainment, even if it is wrapped in a goofy, anti-human cartoon populated with blue people in a Dances with Wolves-type story we’ve all seen a hundred times.
If you don’t want to watch Nolan’s version, there is always the 1954 Kirk Douglas movie Ulysses. All the casting is racially appropriate, but the movie is dull, episodic garbage. I couldn’t even finish it.