‘The Odyssey’ Just Made More Money in 11 Days than an Entire Superman Movie’s Full Theatrical Run

Box office comparisons only mean something when you have a real benchmark to measure against. Earlier this year, James Gunn’s ‘Superman’ gave the DC Universe exactly that kind of benchmark, launching the studio’s new shared universe with a run that critics and industry analysts alike considered a genuine success story.

‘Superman’ opened in July of 2025 to a strong 122 million dollar domestic weekend, eventually climbing past both ‘Man of Steel’ and ‘Batman v Superman’ to become the biggest standalone Superman film ever made. By the time its theatrical run wrapped, the film had settled at a final worldwide total of 615.8 million dollars, a number Warner Bros. celebrated as proof that its new DC direction was working.

That context makes what ‘The Odyssey’ has just done in a fraction of the time even more striking. Christopher Nolan’s Greek epic has already crossed 639.6 million dollars worldwide, meaning it surpassed the entire theatrical lifetime of a film considered a success just eleven days after its own release.

To be clear, this is not a knock on ‘Superman,’ which held its own against a crowded 2025 slate and outperformed every Marvel release that year. It simply illustrates the sheer scale of demand ‘The Odyssey’ has generated in an incredibly short window, especially for a nearly three-hour, R-rated adaptation of an ancient Greek poem rather than a more traditional franchise tentpole.

Much of that momentum comes down to how well the film has held onto its audience rather than just how big its opening was. After debuting to 123.5 million dollars domestically, ‘The Odyssey’ followed with an 87 million dollar second weekend, a drop of less than 30 percent that ranks among the smallest declines ever recorded for any film opening above 100 million dollars.

That kind of consistency is rare for any release, let alone one this long and this demanding of its audience. Comparisons like the one to ‘Superman’ help put that consistency into perspective, since matching an entire year’s worth of another film’s box office run in under two weeks is not something that happens often, even among genuine hits.

Part of what makes the comparison land so well is that both films were seen as wins for their respective studios in very different ways. ‘Superman’ proved DC could launch a fresh cinematic universe with real audience buy-in, while ‘The Odyssey’ is proving Christopher Nolan can turn source material as old as Homer into one of the biggest theatrical events of the year.

With ‘The Odyssey’ still climbing and industry trackers already projecting it past 300 million dollars domestically in the days ahead, comparisons like this one are likely to keep popping up as the film’s total continues to grow. Few releases manage to make an entire year of someone else’s box office success look small in less than two weeks.

For Nolan, whose track record already includes some of the biggest theatrical runs in modern movie history, this latest comparison is just one more data point in what is shaping up to be one of the standout box office stories of the year.

Do you think ‘The Odyssey’ can keep this pace up as it heads deeper into its theatrical run? Share your thoughts in the comments.