The Odyssey is the Highest Grossing Universal Picture
Universal Pictures’ R-rated tentpole, The Odyssey, has become the biggest movie at the box-office in its studio’s history, accumulating $1.6 billion-plus worldwide and counting.
Warner Bros. must be kicking themselves right now. As Warner Bros. struggles with box-office grosses, Universal is thriving. This comparison would be pretty meaningless if the director of the latest Universal success wasn’t Christopher Nolan. You see, Christopher Nolan was not happy with Warner Bros. when Tenet came out during the pandemic, and the studio ended up losing Nolan to Universal where he has now made that studio’s biggest hit to date.
Tenet was released on streaming faster than Nolan would have liked, which led to the filmmaker making his move over to Universal. Nolan’s latest film, The Odyssey, has surpassed $1.6 billion worldwide, besting even the more kid-friendly Jurassic World at the box-office. It’s quite an accomplishment for Universal, especially given the adult nature of Nolan’s successful film.
Universal was also the studio behind One Night Only, a film which fared pretty poorly at the box-office despite being a really funny romantic comedy. With the success of The Odyssey, Universal will certainly get over One Night Only‘s disappointment, but it often feels like The Odyssey ate up much of the other R-rated movie’s audience. It was a case of two adult-themed movies playing that couldn’t both thrive. The Odyssey was the undefeated champion, and it’s now poised for Academy Award glory next, where it could take home Best Picture and Best Director honors.
Maybe Warner Bros. will save face at the box-office with their high-profile upcoming Tom Cruise starrer, Digger. They’ll need to pick up the slack in order to make up for the travesty that the studio endured in losing Nolan as one of their top filmmakers. Warner Bros. lost out this year with big-budget movies like Supergirl, which failed to live up to expectations of both audiences and critics alike. Warner Bros. is also counting on the new The Cat in the Hat movie coming out soon to save face.
Universal has seen many box-office smashes throughout the years like E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and the Fast and the Furious movies, but it turned out that people wanted to see a literary-themed work of great intelligence and turned out in droves to see Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Though The Odyssey is on a path to Academy Award victory, it wasn’t always a sure thing at the box-office. The new Spider-Man movie, which came out just a couple of weeks after The Odyssey, could have defeated The Odyssey altogether. It turned out there was room for both movies to thrive financially at the box-office while almost everything else that came out sadly faltered.
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