Christopher Nolan takes the July frame that made Oppenheimer a phenomenon, and The Odyssey is tracking to blow past it, while last weekend’s two disappointments run straight into their second-weekend tests and Minions & Monsters keeps sliding toward a franchise low.
The Odyssey
Preview numbers are in, and The Odyssey pulled $17.6M from Thursday shows, the biggest preview of 2026, a hair past Toy Story 5’s $17.5M and much bigger than Project Hail Mary’s $12M preview in March — that one ended up at an $80.6M opening; that same preview→opening weekend ratio lands The Odyssey at $118M. The Odyssey should be a little more preview-heavy than PHM, but with this number, $100M is now the floor, and $110M+ become increasingly likely.
The Odyssey is finally here, and it’s gonna be big. The only question is how big. Opening weekend predictions across the web range from a low of $85M to as high as $130M. Based on presales and tracking, we see it right around $100M, but it really depends on whether people will be happy to see it on regular screens, since IMAX and PLF screens are basically completely booked already for the weekend. There’s a chance people wait to see it on the best screen possible, which may slightly deflate the opening (although in that case we’re still seeing easily $90M+), and if that doesn’t happen it could reach higher, to $110M or so. The one swing factor had been reviews, and they just dropped this morning at a magical 98% from 110 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s the kind of number that gets people out of their houses and into the cinema, regardless of what size screen they can get tickets for, which makes the upper end of our prediction start to look much more likely — potentially even over $110M.
The comp everyone reaches for is Oppenheimer, which opened to $82.4M on this same July weekend in 2023 and legged to $330M. Nolan’s post-Batman openings have climbed every time, from Interstellar’s $47.5M to Dunkirk’s $50.5M to Oppenheimer’s $82.4M, and The Odyssey should continue that trend and clear all of them for his biggest debut since The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. The premium-format angle is the tell: nearly half of Oppenheimer’s opening came from PLF and IMAX, and Nolan owns every large-format screen in the country for two weekends before Spider-Man: Brand New Day takes them on July 31, although we’d expect The Odyssey to reclaim some after two weekends since the demand to see it in IMAX is so high. It’s basically impossible to find any prime-time IMAX seats across LA and NY locations, not just on weekends but any night of the week. With all of that said, we expect over $100M this weekend and a long, healthy run deep into August, easily clearing $300M domestic. This is the win July needed.
Moana
Moana takes #2, but that is the ceiling of the good news. It opened to just $43.1M last weekend, the second-worst debut of any Disney live-action remake, on a $250M budget, and now it faces a second weekend with no holiday to prop it up. The saving grace is the A- CinemaScore and 90% audience score against a brutal 34% from critics, plus the fact that The Odyssey pulls adults and leaves the family lane wide open. If it can manage to drop less than 50%, that would be very good news here. Anything over $20M would be good, giving it a weekend around $25M and a 10-day cume near $85M. If it can find some stabilization and become the default family choice for the rest of the summer, it can still shoot for around $135M domestically. Not enough to save it, but at least not in the same category as Supergirl and Masters of the Universe.
Minions & Monsters
Minions & Monsters really needs a stabilizing hold this weekend. It sits at $108.9M through two weekends after a $37M debut, running roughly 47% behind Despicable Me 4 at the same stage. It’ll be hoping for a hold of about 40% or so for $13M, pushing it past $120M domestically. The $200M dream is gone, and this is now tracking toward $150M to $175M domestic, the lowest total in franchise history by a wide margin. As we already said though, this is already profitable and worldwide should still easily clear $400M. The franchise needs a rebound after this, but is in no way dead.
Toy Story 5
Toy Story 5 has already crossed $400M and should add another $13M or so in weekend five, getting it to around $425M and just a few days from passing The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s $430M to become the top domestic grosser of the year. That’s a position it will hold for just a few weeks, until Spider-Man blows past it, probably within its first 10 days. It should find itself headed to a total between $450M and $475M domestic, a jump up from the previous franchise high of $434M (Toy Story 4).
Evil Dead Burn
Evil Dead Burn hits the wall that gets every horror opener. It debuted to $13.7M, running 44% behind Evil Dead Rise’s $24.5M bow in 2023, and horror second weekends are often unforgiving. Rise itself fell 56%, and this is going up against intense competition from The Odyssey, so expect something worse here, a drop near 65% to roughly $4.5–5M and a cume around $22M. That points to a final around $30M, well short of Rise’s $67M domestic, and a quiet result for a title Warner Bros. hoped would hold the horror slot into August.
Rest of the chart: Obsession hits streaming and is finally winding down its record-breaking, unprecedented run. It should final around $260M or so, off a $17M opening weekend. Disclosure Day ($111.5M) and Supergirl ($66.2M) round out a top ten that The Odyssey is about to tower over.
Bottom line: The Odyssey opens north of $100M and makes this the biggest weekend of the summer since Toy Story 5, while everything below it fights for scraps. Anything under $90M for Nolan would be surprising at this point, and anything over $100M puts a $300M-plus domestic run firmly in play, on track to challenge or beat Oppenheimer’s $330M domestic final.
Christopher Nolan just posted the biggest opening of his career outside the Batman trilogy, and it wasn’t close — The Odyssey took $123.5M, clearing our preview call and the top of the industry’s range. Meanwhile, all three family films held decently and are well set to be the default kids/family choices for the rest of their runs.
The Odyssey
The Odyssey opened to $123.5M and cleared every bar we set. Wednesday’s preview called $103–116M against a web-wide $85–130M range; it beat our high end and finished near the top of everyone’s. That makes it the biggest debut of Nolan’s career outside the Dark Knight trilogy — past Oppenheimer’s $82.5M on this exact July weekend in 2023 by more than $40M, and behind only The Dark Knight Rises ($160.9M) and The Dark Knight ($158.4M) all-time. The $31,768 per-theater average on 3,919 screens is a number only IMAX-anchored event films post, and the internal weekend backs it up: strip the $17.6M in Thursday previews out of Friday, and Saturday actually rose over the film’s true opening day, demand building rather than front-loading.
The reception says the legs are real: an A CinemaScore, a 96% Tomatometer, and a career-best 97% audience score. Our model is predicting an over-$400M domestic finish; while that does seem likely, we’ll need to see how the second weekend holds before we can say it’s locked. That being said, Nolan’s post-Batman holds do back up a $400M finish: Oppenheimer legged 4.0x to $330M, Interstellar and Dunkirk both roughly 3.9x to $188M. If The Odyssey’s legs match at 4x, that’s a $500M finish. Since it opened bigger, it might be a little more front-loaded than those films, but legs of 3x feel like the floor, meaning $375M is probably the worst case for this one.
Moana
Moana held #2 but gave back 56% — worse than the sub-50% hold we’d hoped for in the preview, but a decent drop all things considered. At $82.1M through ten days on a $250M budget, that still doesn’t save this film, and we’re looking at a finish maybe around $130M: just half of what could have been expected here before it opened. Worldwide it’s at $178M, and $300M worldwide might be the aim here if it can stabilize for the rest of the run.
Toy Story 5
Toy Story 5 barely moved — down just 22% for $14.8M, a shade above the $13M we projected — and did exactly what we flagged Wednesday: it passed The Super Mario Galaxy Movie ($429.8M) to become the #1 domestic release of 2026, now at $430.9M. While it won’t hold the crown for very long with Spider-Man on the horizon, this weekend was exactly the drop it needed to leg out as the default family film for the rest of the summer. Look for around $475M as the likely domestic total when all is said and done. Worldwide it’s at $908.5M and $1B is absolutely locked, making it the third film of the year to pass that milestone — with Spider-Man and most likely The Odyssey both set to clear that same bar in the coming weeks.
Minions & Monsters
Minions & Monsters got exactly the stabilizing hold we said it needed — down 30%, not the ~40% we’d penciled in — for $14.8M and $137.6M through three weekends. It’s still running behind Despicable Me 4’s pace, but a 30% third weekend is a leggy-family signature, and points the outlook toward something close to a $200M domestic final if it can continue to have strong holds for the rest of the run. Worldwide is now at over $350M and should hopefully end up at more than $450M by the time it’s done. While that’s still down about 50% from the franchise average, it’s more than enough to justify another one since these films are cheap for animation standards at a budget of just $85M. Let’s just hope the next one can rebound and not continue the decline we saw here.
Evil Dead Burn
Evil Dead Burn hit the wall every horror opener hits with a big drop of 64%, right on the ~65% we called, to $5M and $24.2M in ten days. That tracks both the genre and its own franchise: it opened 44% behind Evil Dead Rise’s $24.5M bow in 2023, and Rise itself fell 56% in its second frame. It should finish at around $30–$35M, enough to justify the $20M budget, but not enough to warrant another film.