Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey holds the domestic box office in a grip that none of its competitors have come anywhere near loosening.
With nothing new arriving to challenge it, per Variety, The Odyssey holds its top spot for a second straight weekend. The film took an estimated $25.9 million domestically on Friday and looks headed for about $84.5 million across the three days.
Set against its enormous $124 million opening, that amounts to a decline of only about 32 percent, which is the sort of second-weekend hold that most three-hour dramas adapted from ancient Greek poetry could never dream of posting.
The North American running total should land somewhere around $283 million once Sunday closes out.
The Odyssey box office run has a billion in sight
This latest result is one more chapter in what has quietly become a historic theatrical run for the director.
The worldwide opening came to $264.1 million, which is the largest global launch Nolan has ever posted. The previous holder was The Dark Knight Rises at $249 million in 2012.
What makes the number genuinely startling is the shape of the movie behind it. There is no franchise scaffolding here, no cape, no animated mascot chasing a family audience, just an adult-skewing historical fantasy that asks viewers to sit for nearly three hours, and they keep showing up anyway.
A combination of strong reviews, real audience appetite and unusually heavy demand for premium-format screens has pushed the film into the top tier of the summer’s theatrical events. Rather than deflating after a giant debut, The Odyssey holds its momentum, driving repeat business and the kind of word of mouth that keeps a title alive for weeks.
Nolan’s personal high-water mark is still The Dark Knight Rises, which wrapped its run a hair above $1 billion worldwide. If the current holds keep up, even that ceiling starts to look reachable.
Hadestown finds its audience as The Odyssey stays on top
No film came close to the summit, though Hadestown: The Musical turned in a perfectly respectable debut of its own.
The filmed capture of the award-winning stage show collected an estimated $4 million on Friday, and projections have it finishing the weekend somewhere near $9 million.
Its cast includes Reeve Carney, Eva Noblezada, Patrick Page, André De Shields and Amber Gray, all reprising a production that reimagines the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice against the fraught push and pull between Hades and Persephone.
That staging walked away with eight Tony Awards after reaching Broadway, Best Musical among them, and the theatrical version keeps all five of its original principal performers intact.
The weekend box office produced a nice bit of symmetry as a result, because Greek mythology now occupies both of the top two positions, with Nolan’s sweeping Homer adaptation in front and the far more intimate musical settling in right behind it.
Disney’s live-action Moana keeps struggling
Third place went to Disney’s live-action Moana, which drew an estimated $3.1 million on Friday.
The weekend projection of $10.8 million would carry its North American tally to roughly $102 million after three weekends in release. Ordinarily a nine-figure domestic result invites a small celebration, but the mood shifts once you set it beside a reported $250 million production budget.
By Variety’s original accounting, the remake could end up costing Disney as much as $100 million before it is done, which slots it among the studio’s more painful entries in a summer that has refused to follow any predictable script.
The wins have been real enough elsewhere, with The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Toy Story 5 both landing well, yet Moana and The Mandalorian and Grogu have reportedly come in beneath what the studio was hoping for.
Toy Story 5 closes in on $1 billion while The Odyssey leads
Where Moana has faltered, Toy Story 5 just keeps generating cash for Disney and Pixar.
Friday brought the animated sequel an estimated $2.9 million, and its sixth weekend is on pace for another $10.1 million or so, lifting the North American figure to somewhere around $448.6 million.
The bigger story is the worldwide line, which is now inching toward $1 billion. Cross it, and the film has a genuine shot at overtaking Toy Story 4 and its roughly $1.07 billion global total to become the highest-grossing chapter the franchise has produced.
Better than three decades on from the first outing with Woody and Buzz Lightyear, these characters remain about as dependable a draw as Disney has.
Minions & Monsters stays a modest win for Universal
Universal’s Minions & Monsters fills out the top five.
The animated adventure picked up an estimated $2.8 million on Friday and looks headed for around $9.5 million in its fourth weekend, which would move its North American total to about $155 million.
Those figures trail the franchise’s high points by a wide margin, given that the original Minions reached roughly $1.15 billion worldwide and Minions: The Rise of Gru closed near $940 million globally. What the newest installment has going for it is endurance, with a projected weekend dip of only about 30 percent.
Because the film carries a reported budget of just $85 million, it was never obligated to scale those billion-dollar heights to turn a profit, and its combination of modest cost and steady weekly holds has quietly made it another win for Universal.
Everyone else, in the meantime, is essentially auditioning for second place. Nolan has converted the summer into his own private kingdom, and The Odyssey holds the box office with a grip so commanding that audiences seem nowhere near ready to walk out of it.
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