LOS ANGELES – The first count came in Thursday night: $15 million in preview screenings, the best opening-night figure for any live-action film released in North America this year, and the strongest Thursday showing Christopher Nolan has posted since The Dark Knight earned $18.5 million in a single night in 2008. The Odyssey, Universal Pictures’ adaptation of Homer’s 2,700-year-old epic starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, is tracking toward a $90 million to $100 million domestic opening weekend, which would rank as Nolan’s largest debut since The Dark Knight Rises opened to $160 million in 2012, Deadline reported.
The figure arrived from 3,900 North American locations, 25 of which were screening the film in the native IMAX 70mm format for which it was shot. Those 25 locations had been sold out for months. The remaining 3,875 theaters were the ones keeping the count moving Thursday night, and they did: the audience that arrived was not confined to the premium-format faithful. Rotten Tomatoes audience score stood at 96 percent after the Thursday screenings, the highest any Nolan film has received from the public, ahead of the 94 percent grades earned by Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Memento, and the 91 percent that Oppenheimer received after its 2023 release.
The opening exceeded comparable Thursday figures for Oppenheimer, which earned $10.5 million on its first night before expanding to an $82 million domestic opening weekend and eventually crossing $952 million globally. It also surpassed Dune: Part Two ($12 million previews, $82.5 million opening) and approached Avatar: The Way of Water, which earned $17 million on its opening night in 2022. Globally, The Odyssey is projecting above $200 million for its opening weekend, with the international component tracking at $110 million to $120 million, according to Variety, positioning the film’s worldwide debut above Oppenheimer’s global opening of $181 million.
The cast that delivered those numbers includes Damon as the war-weary king, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, Robert Pattinson, Jon Bernthal, and Zendaya. For months before Thursday, a portion of the online commentary about the film ran in the opposite direction: that Nyong’o’s casting was wrong, that the contemporary English dialogue was inappropriate for an ancient epic, that Nolan had misjudged his material. Nolan dismissed that criticism as “irrelevant” at the film’s Mumbai premiere, citing the earthy, accessible register of Homer’s original text as validation for the choice to translate the story into modern English. The Thursday audience does not appear to have been much interested in that debate.
The production was shot entirely on IMAX cameras, a first for a major Hollywood feature, over two years in Morocco and across Southern Europe. Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame worked with more than two million feet of IMAX film, and the resulting 172-minute cut maintains the expanded 1.43:1 IMAX aspect ratio throughout the entire runtime. For the 25 theaters able to project it properly, the film occupies the full screen from edge to edge. Demand for those venues was unambiguous: when AMC opened IMAX 70mm presales in June, the platform crashed under demand and seats appeared on eBay for $1,500. The Thursday preview count confirmed that the crash was not an artifact of artificial scarcity but an expression of genuine scale.
Nolan’s films have consistently outperformed their opening weekends in the second and third week of release, particularly internationally, a pattern that Oppenheimer extended further than any previous title in his filmography. Whether The Odyssey follows the same curve depends partly on what CinemaScore registers when the first full-weekend surveys are conducted, a figure that had not been released as of Thursday night. A score below A would signal that the preview audience was not representative of the general weekend crowd. Nolan’s last four major releases have each earned A or A-minus on the scale.
The summer box office context matters here. Toy Story 5 opened to $135 million in late June, leading a summer on pace to approach $10 billion domestically for the first time since before the pandemic. Michael, Lionsgate’s Michael Jackson biopic, earned $97 million on its opening weekend. Both benefited from franchise infrastructure or pre-sold brand recognition that The Odyssey does not have in the same form. What the Odyssey carries instead is a director with two decades of evidence that his films find their full audience over time, a cast assembled for international pull, and a source text recognizable enough outside academic contexts that its title alone functions as shorthand for epic scale. The Zendaya and Tom Holland elements of the marketing campaign appear to have reached beyond the subset of filmgoers who would have bought tickets regardless of cast.
The global scale of the release is part of what the opening weekend figure will test most directly. Oppenheimer opened on 17,500 screens internationally. The Odyssey is releasing on 22,700 screens outside North America, a wider footprint that is part of what positions the film for a global debut above its predecessor’s opening, even if the domestic comparison to The Dark Knight Rises remains out of reach. The question of whether The Odyssey can build toward the $1 billion threshold will not be answered this weekend. What Thursday answered is narrower: the audience that Nolan has spent twenty years cultivating is large enough and willing enough to pay that the $15 million preview figure is not a ceiling. It is a floor.
Full opening weekend estimates will arrive Friday evening after the first complete day of general release. The gap between The Odyssey’s domestic opening and the $160 million of The Dark Knight Rises is real and is not going to close in a single weekend. What Thursday answered is the more interesting question: whether the idea Nolan has been building across his career, that a certain class of film can make the theater feel like the only place to be, still holds at a scale large enough to matter commercially. At $15 million in previews and 96 percent audience approval before a single matinee has played, the answer from the people who showed up Thursday night is that it does.
