Tom Cruise's flop gave Nolan his Imax screens back — The Odyssey is now chasing Barbie
The Odyssey gave up its 70mm Imax screens to make room for Tom Cruise. A week later the prints went back to Nolan, and an 18-week-old film went up by almost 60%. The most expensive week of Tom
The Odyssey gave up its 70mm Imax screens to make room for Tom Cruise. A week later the prints went back to Nolan, and an 18-week-old film went up by almost 60%.
The most expensive week of Tom Cruise's autumn has turned out to be a rather good one for Christopher Nolan. On Friday 9 October, Universal put The Odyssey back into select Imax and Imax 70mm cinemas, reclaiming the screens it had handed over to Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Digger only a week earlier. The return was enough to push a film in its 18th week of release back into the US top ten: a projected $2 million weekend from just 560 locations, up nearly 60%, for a domestic total of around $622 million.
"I still haven't been able to Imax Odyssey tickets at my theater. They get sold out immediately," one fan complained in the r/boxoffice weekend thread, where the most upvoted verdict was a curt "Taking back IMAX from Digger was a smart move." Another reported a 40%-full Imax screen on a Friday night, "which is crazy for a movie that's been out three months".
Seven days of Digger
There are only around 41 cinemas in the world that can project 15-perf 70mm Imax film, the format Nolan shot The Odyssey for, and it had held most of them since July. Then Digger arrived on 2 October with its own 70mm Imax presentation, Emmanuel Lubezki behind the camera and Cruise in the title role. What it didn't bring was an audience:
- Opening weekend: $8 million in the US after $1.2 million in previews, against Warner Bros.' own forecast of $12–15 million.
- The record nobody wanted: Cruise's weakest opening since Lions for Lambs in 2007.
- Budget: reportedly $125 million or more before marketing, with some estimates of the eventual loss running to $150–200 million.
- Week two: about $3 million, for roughly $14 million in total.
Fair enough, the Imax chain had a business to run. But after one weekend the maths was obvious, and the prints went back to the film that had been filling them for three months.
Tom Cruise was meant to replace Nolan in Imax. He ended up giving him a second run.
Barbie and Deadpool in sight
It also puts Nolan back in a race with two films that looked out of reach. The top ten US releases of the 2020s, as tallied on r/boxoffice, runs Spider-Man: Brand New Day ($956 million and counting), Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water and Inside Out 2, then Deadpool & Wolverine and Barbie on about $636 million each. The Odyssey is next, roughly $14 million behind both.
Read more: 'Love the arts, f— the charts': Hollywood rallies behind Tom Cruise's $280 million flop Digger
That's a lot of $2 million weekends, and r/boxoffice reckons a final total of "630M+". Then again, nobody had The Odyssey back in the top ten in October either. Every week it keeps the 70mm prints is a week Barbie can hear footsteps, and Greta Gerwig's film managed $636 million while Oppenheimer took most of the premium screens. This time Nolan has them to himself.
Bigger than Avatar in Korea
In South Korea the overtaking has already happened. According to Korean Film Council data reported on 11 October, The Odyssey had taken 138.3 billion won by 10 October, edging past the roughly 137.9 billion won of Avatar: The Way of Water to become the highest-grossing foreign film ever released there. By admissions it is only fifth, with 12.15 million tickets: plenty of Koreans paid premium-format prices to see it. Spider-Man: Brand New Day was left behind in August.
Globally The Odyssey is already Universal's highest-grossing film ever and the biggest Imax release in history. Digger is now looking for an audience on ordinary screens. Iñárritu wanted 70mm and Cruise wanted a hit. Nolan got both.