How Much ‘The Odyssey’ Needs to Make at the Box Office to Profit

The Odyssey is the latest film from Christopher Nolan, the celebrated director behind hits like The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer. Nolan is tackling Homer’s epic poem about Odysseus (Matt Damon) trying to get home to Ithaca after fighting in the Trojan War, a story that has been in circulation for well over 2,000 years. It’s a big swing for Nolan and for Universal Pictures. Will they hit a home run or strike out?

There has been buzz around The Odyssey since before it even finished filming. Nolan has a reputation for creating grand cinematic events, and there’s little doubt that The Odyssey will make a lot of money. The question is whether it will make enough to justify its enormous budget and to overcome some of the negative buzz it has weathered in recent months.

How Much Did ‘The Odyssey’ Cost (and How Much Does It Need to Make)?

The Odyssey cost $250 million to produce. That’s an extremely large budget, especially for an original film that isn’t a remake or part of an established franchise. For reference, Disney’s live-action Moana remake also cost $250 million, and Moana is already on track to be one of the year’s biggest flops. Hopefully, people are more interested in seeing The Odyssey.

Movie theaters keep around half of the proceeds from ticket sales. A rule of thumb is that a movie needs to make around double its production budget to turn a profit, which means The Odyssey will need to bring in over $500 million to be profitable. A tentpole movie as big as The Odyssey likely has a marketing spend of around $100 million, which could raise the profitability floor to $600 million.

The Odyssey is the most expensive original movie that Christopher Nolan has ever made; The Dark Knight Rises (2012) also cost $250 million, but that was the climax of a trilogy and a sequel to the tremendously successful The Dark Knight (2008). The Odyssey is a bigger risk, but Nolan’s track record is so good that Universal executives likely aren’t losing much sleep over it.

Christopher Nolan Is A Franchise Onto Himself

Director Christopher Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema on the set of The Odyssey with an IMAX camera

Christopher Nolan is one of the most consistently successful filmmakers working today. He’s the only director to ever have five consecutive movies each make over $500 million at the worldwide box office, a streak that started with The Dark Knight and ran through Dunkirk (2017). That streak likely would have continued if Nolan’s 2020 film Tenet hadn’t been released during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were not inclined to go to theaters. Also, Warner Bros. Discovery opted to release Tenet in theaters and on HBO Max on the same day, which gave people another reason to avoid buying a movie ticket. That strategy vexed Nolan so much that he parted ways with the studio, which is why he made The Odyssey for Universal.

In 2023, Nolan released Oppenheimer, a biopic about nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy). The film made $975 million at the worldwide box office. That’s impressive for any movie, but especially so for a talky biopic with long stretches in black and white. If Nolan can get people to turn out in droves to see Oppenheimer, the thinking goes, it should be easy to get them to watch an adventure story where Matt Damon fights a series of mythological monsters.

The early signs are very good. According to Deadline, the movie is expected to make around $80 to $100 million on its opening weekend, and that’s only from the domestic market. A sweeping, star-studded epic like The Odyssey also stands an excellent chance of doing well overseas. Advance tickets for The Odyssey went on sale a full year before release, and they were a hot ticket item right out of the gate. Sales for premium-large format (PLF) screenings like IMAX were so robust that they crashed the AMC website.

The Odyssey is the first movie in history to be shot entirely on 70mm film, which will make it look especially impressive in PLF formats. That’s the kind of innovation that makes The Odyssey feel less like another movie and more like an unmissable event. Universal hopes these efforts translate into huge profits.

The Challenges Facing ‘The Odyssey’

The Odyssey has a runtime of almost three hours, which could limit how many showtimes per day theaters can have. It’s also rated R, which may keep away some audiences. The movie has also faced backlash online over Nolan’s choice to cast actors like Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page in supporting roles. Nolan has mostly brushed off the criticisms. “These conversations that happen before people see the film — they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet,” he said.

Nolan has dealt with this kind of backlash before. He experienced pushback when he was chosen to direct Batman Begins (2005), and again when he cast Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight. Ledger later won an Oscar for the role. Nolan said:

“When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents. And what I learned over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.”

Early reactions to The Odyssey have been incredibly positive. The movie opens on July 17, 2026.