Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Is Now Tracking to Dethrone ‘Deadpoll & Wolverine’ as the Highest-Grossing R-Rated Movie of All Time

Christopher Nolan has never been a stranger to box office milestones, but even by his standards, ‘The Odyssey’ is shaping up to be something extraordinary. The film has spent its first two weekends in theaters absolutely dominating global charts, and the numbers behind that run keep getting harder to believe.

Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic poem opened with the biggest global debut of his career, and it has only built momentum since. After just two weekends, the film has already crossed 639.6 million dollars worldwide, a pace that puts it on a genuine path toward the billion-dollar mark most blockbusters never even approach.

That trajectory is now fueling speculation about just how historic this run could ultimately become. Beyond simply crossing a billion dollars globally, ‘The Odyssey’ appears to be tracking toward overtaking ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, which closed its run at 1.08 billion dollars, to become the single highest-grossing film of Nolan’s entire career.

Even more striking is the possibility that ‘The Odyssey’ could eventually surpass ‘Deadpool and Wolverine’ as the highest-grossing R-rated film ever made. That Marvel blockbuster finished its own theatrical run at 1.338 billion dollars worldwide, a benchmark that once seemed untouchable for an R-rated release given how few films in that category ever reach nine figures, let alone ten.

The pace of driving that speculation has been remarkable even by tentpole standards. ‘The Odyssey’ opened to 263.7 million dollars worldwide, the biggest global start of Nolan’s career, and followed that with an 87 million dollar domestic second weekend that broke his own previous record set by ‘The Dark Knight’.

Much of that success has been powered by IMAX, where the film has already become the format’s highest grossing sophomore weekend ever recorded. IMAX’s own reporting shows the format alone accounts for 140 million dollars of the film’s total, underscoring just how much premium format demand has driven this particular release.

The film’s domestic performance has been just as impressive in its own right. With a running total of 286.3 million dollars, ‘The Odyssey’ has already become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of the year domestically, putting it ahead of other major releases in that category.

Industry watchers have also noted that the film’s unusually low reliance on a massive theater footprint makes its box office run something of an outlier. A relatively smaller number of premium format screens have been driving an outsized share of the total gross, a pattern more commonly associated with filmmakers like James Cameron than typical wide releases.

With ‘Spider-Man Brand New Day’ set to open the following weekend and expected to pull in massive numbers of its own, ‘The Odyssey’ will need to hold onto its premium screens carefully to keep this pace alive. Even so, projections currently place ‘The Odyssey’, ‘Avengers Doomsday’, and ‘Spider-Man Brand New Day’ as the three films most likely to cross the billion-dollar mark by the end of the year.

For a three-hour, R-rated adaptation of a three-thousand-year-old poem, reaching this level of commercial dominance would be an almost unprecedented achievement. If the current trajectory holds, ‘The Odyssey’ may end up rewriting box office history in more ways than one.

‘The Odyssey’ is currently playing in theaters worldwide.

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