Nolan’s Odyssey Just Keeps Rowing: $20M Tuesday, and the Second Weekend Could Outdo Dark Knight

Christopher Nolan’s big-screen swing at Homer isn’t letting up. Tuesday brought in roughly $20 million domestically, and industry trackers now think the film’s second weekend could land anywhere from $61 million to $74 million — numbers that would put it in rare company among Nolan’s own sequel-weekend history.

Stack that Tuesday haul against every other Tuesday so far this year, and only one release beats it: Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 5, which pulled in $23.69 million back in June. Narrow the comparison to Universal releases specifically, and The Odyssey trails just one title — 2015’s Jurassic World, which posted $24.3 million on a Tuesday over a decade ago.

The film is holding onto its IMAX and premium large-format screens for weekend two, and that’s part of why forecasters expect a relatively gentle slide — somewhere in the 40% to 50% range — down to that $61.8M–$74M window.

If the top end of that range holds, The Odyssey would edge out the best second weekends turned in by either of Nolan’s Dark Knight films: 2008’s original, which dropped 61% to $75.1 million (still his biggest sophomore-weekend haul), or 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, which fell the same percentage to $62.1 million. Worth noting, though — superhero tentpoles tend to front-load their audiences harder than an ensemble epic like this one, so a lot of number-crunchers aren’t treating the Dark Knight comparison as a perfect apples-to-apples benchmark.

Either way, three weeks removed from release, Nolan’s mythological epic is still setting the pace at the domestic box office.