Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Leaves One of the Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Ever in the Dust

Published Jul 18, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT

Rohan Naahar is a News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he’ll watch anything once. He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.

Just two years after he won his first Best Director Oscar, Christopher Nolan is back with a new movie that many are predicting could win him another. Nolan’s 2023 biographical thriller Oppenheimer exceeded expectations at the box office, grossing nearly $1 billion worldwide against a reported budget of $100 million. Nolan’s latest is The Odyssey, which ties with The Dark Knight Rises as the filmmaker’s most expensive movie with a reported budget of $250 million. At that cost, the film would need to gross around $1 billion worldwide in order to qualify as a bona fide blockbuster. And it’s certainly off to a fantastic start thanks to a “Certified Fresh” 95% critics’ score and a “Verified Hot” 97% audience score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, in addition to an A grade from opening-day audiences on CinemaScore.

Combined with the contract stipulations that guarantee an extraordinarily long theatrical window for Nolan’s movies, The Odyssey is in great shape. The movie opened in more than 70 territories worldwide this week, with China, Japan, and South Korea on the horizon. At the domestic box office, The Odyssey grossed $18 million in Thursday previews — the best preview haul of the year so far. The movie is on track to beat Michael’s opening weekend record to deliver the top debut haul for a live-action movie in 2026. It’s also poised to deliver the best debut of star Matt Damon’s career, and the third-biggest of Nolan’s career, behind only The Dark Knight Rises ($160 million) and ***The Dark Knight ***($158 million).

Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

window.arrayOfGalleries[“article-gallery-1-2012291197”] = ’“<div class=“w-gallery-carousel”><section id=“main-carousel-1-2012291197” class=“splide splide-gallery” data-gallery-expanded-id=“main-expanable-carousel-1-2012291197” data-gallery-expanded-thumbnail-id=“expanded-gallery-thumbnails-1-2012291197”><button class=“expand icon i-expand” type=“button”></button><div class=“splide__track”><ul class=“splide__list” style=“—gallery-aspect-sm: 2 / 1; —gallery-aspect-md: 2 / 1; —gallery-aspect-lg: 2 / 1;” ><li class=“splide__slide gallery-main-img”>