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Eighteen weeks in, The Odyssey got its big screens back. Christopher Nolan’s epic returned to 70mm IMAX on Friday (Oct. 9), one week after giving those prints up to Tom Cruise’s Digger, and the bump was immediate. Deadline projected a jump of nearly 60% to about $2 million for the weekend from 560 locations, enough to put it back in the domestic top 10 and lift its North American total to about $622 million.
Digger was supposed to be the next IMAX event. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s satire, with Cruise as an oil tycoon trying to stop an environmental disaster he caused, opened to $8 million in North America and $20 million worldwide against a net cost of about $160 million, Deadline reported. Its second weekend was tracking at about $3 million. In the U.K., most IMAX cinemas switched back to Nolan’s film on Friday, with a handful keeping one Digger show a day, per NME.
Read more'Rolling Loud: The Movie' Bombs at the Box Office Despite Owen Wilson and Travis Scott
Cruise isn’t counting opening weekends. “When I am making [movies], I’m not going, ‘Opening weekend!’ I feel very much like we’re going to make something that is a lasting piece of cinema,” he said on the On Film With Kevin McCarthy podcast, via NME.
The Odyssey already has the numbers to back up its return. It is Universal’s highest-grossing film ever at $1.76 billion worldwide, $1.1 billion of it from overseas, Deadline reported on Oct. 5. In August it passed The Dark Knight Rises to become Nolan’s biggest movie.
The Travis Scott connection
Hip-hop has a stake in that total. Travis Scott has a small but significant role in the film and collaborated on its end-credits song, “When I’m Home,” Variety reported in July. Nolan explained the casting to Time in May. “I cast him because I wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap,” he said, via Rolling Stone.
Scott’s other movie this season went the other way: Rolling Loud: The Movie, in which he plays himself, opened to about $474,000 the same weekend Digger arrived. Watch The Odyssey trailer below.
The comeback has a short window. Paramount’s Street Fighter, with 50 Cent as Balrog, takes over IMAX screens on Oct. 16.
- Weekend (Oct. 9–11)
- About $2M from 560 locations, up nearly 60% (Deadline projection)
- Domestic total
- About $622M
- Worldwide
- $1.76B, Universal’s highest ever
- Digger opening
- $8M domestic, $20M worldwide
