The Odyssey set for a strong Oppenheimer-style hold for a ~$70M second weekend and $270M in 10 days; heading for $400M+ domestic

Let’s start with the number that just landed. $21.4M on Tuesday is a genuinely absurd figure for a fifth day of release, and the way to see it is to line those first weekdays up against the Nolan films The Odyssey is chasing. It did $18.7M on Monday and $21.4M on Tuesday; The Dark Knight, off a bigger opening, did $24.5M and $20.9M; The Dark Knight Rises did $19.4M and $17.8M; Oppenheimer did $12.7M and $12.1M. The Odyssey’s Tuesday out-grossed the first Tuesday of all three, and it is the only one of the four whose Tuesday rose rather than fell — up 14% on the Discount Tuesday bump, where The Dark Knight slid 15% into its own first Tuesday, The Dark Knight Rises 8%, and Oppenheimer 5%. A film gaining ground on its fifth day rather than bleeding a front-loaded core is the profile of a film that holds in the low-40s next weekend rather than the high-40s, which firms up the call below toward the top of our range.

Back to last weekend's number: The Odyssey opened to $123.5M, and now comes the number that actually decides its summer: the second-weekend hold — and here Nolan’s own filmography splits cleanly in two. His Batman tentpoles opened enormous, and then The Dark Knight dropped 53% in its second weekend off that $158.4M debut, and The Dark Knight Rises 61% off $160.9M. His adult-driven originals dropped smaller off a lower opening: Oppenheimer opened to $82.4M on this same late-July frame in 2023 and dropped 43.4% in weekend two to $46.7M on its way to $329.9M domestic; Dunkirk fell 47.3% and Interstellar 40.4%. The Odyssey opened over 40% higher than Oppenheimer, it carries strong audience and critic scores (A CinemaScore, a 4.4 on Letterboxd, 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, 95% with critics), and its Monday and Tuesday held better than any of them held theirs. Put that profile on an Oppenheimer-style 43% drop and you land around $70M, which would set it up for a 10-day domestic cume of around $270M.

The premium-format demand is helping with the drop here: IMAX and PLF screens have been sold out for a week and a half, prime-time seats across LA and New York are still gone on weeknights, and Nolan owns every large-format screen in the country until Spider-Man takes them on July 31. That is exactly the wall of pent-up demand that produces a soft second-weekend drop, because everyone who couldn’t get the seat they wanted in week one is still trying to get it now. It also quietly settles the argument that trails every adult-skewing original around, the one that says audiences won’t turn out for a hard-R original with no franchise behind it. In this case, Nolan is the franchise.

Our model has The Odyssey finishing between $423M and $453M domestic on 3.5x legs, and a second weekend around $70M keeps it in the upper half of that band. That runs it clear past Oppenheimer’s $330M to become the biggest of Nolan’s films outside the Batman trilogy, and at the top of that band it would climb into the trilogy’s territory too, edging past The Dark Knight Rises’ $448M and leaving only The Dark Knight’s $533M ahead of it in his entire catalogue. If it did happen to leg as well as Oppenheimer (4x opening), that would get it to $500M. Either way, $400M looks close to locked, and this will end up as one of the biggest R-rated grossers ever.

The overseas number is where this gets genuinely big. The Odyssey has $140.3M of its $263.8M worldwide from international already, with several major markets still to open, and Oppenheimer rode this same profile all the way to $975.8M worldwide. Match that pace and The Odyssey is a $1B-class release on a mythology that travels better than a period drama about physics ever did. We can’t say that $1B is locked just yet, but we may be able to after this weekend.

Moana leads a genuine three-way scrum for second, and it earned pole position the hard way, out-grossing both Toy Story 5 and Minions & Monsters on Monday. It needed to. The live-action remake opened to just $43.1M, the second-worst debut of any Disney live-action redo, then fell 58% in its second weekend, and its one real asset now is that The Odyssey pulls the adults and leaves it the default family pick of late July. The A- CinemaScore and 90% audience score against a brutal 34% from critics are what keep the weekday floor from caving, and a hold near 32% gets it to about $12M and a cume around $100M by Sunday night.

None of that changes the ending. On a $250M budget, a $125–133M domestic run is a write-off, and $177.3M worldwide through 11 days will not rescue it either. But there is a real difference between a film that stabilizes into the summer’s default kids option and one that simply collapses, and a steady third weekend keeps Moana on the right side of that line, out of the Supergirl tier of 2026 wreckage even if it never gets anywhere near its budget.

The calendar helps more than the reviews do. No new kids title opens until PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie on August 14, so for three weeks Moana splits the entire family audience with only Toy Story 5 and Minions, which is deep enough into its run that the matinee crowd is looking for something newer. That is the one structural advantage a soft opener can actually bank on, and it is the whole case for Moana holding steadier from here than its 58% second weekend implied. If it is going to leg toward anything respectable, this quiet stretch is where it happens.

Toy Story 5 already collected the headline it wanted this week. Sometime Monday it ticked past $431.6M and slipped by The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s $429.8M to become the highest-grossing film of 2026 domestically. This is a sixth weekend now, so the race is with the calendar rather than the chart, and its steadiest weekly hold of the run, down 31% on Monday, points to a soft weekend drop near 30%, another $9.5M or so and a cume near $445M. It will clear Toy Story 4’s $434M franchise record on Friday.

The bigger prize is the year-end crown, and it is suddenly a three-way race. At $957.5M worldwide, Toy Story 5 clears $1B in the next two weeks to become 2026’s third billion-dollar movie (Mario and Michael being the other two), and it will hold the top spot for exactly as long as it takes The Odyssey to climb past it from below and Spider-Man to lap them both from above, probably inside that film’s first ten days. A Pixar sequel spending a few weeks as the biggest movie of the year is a run the studio will be very happy with. This is an increase from 4 and the top performance for the franchise, one that is proving remarkably consistent with 3, 4 and now 5 all topping $1B worldwide.

Minions & Monsters keeps sliding toward a franchise low that looked impossible when this series was minting $360M-plus grossers. It sits at $138.2M after four weeks off a $37M debut, running roughly 47% behind Despicable Me 4 at the same stage, and Despicable Me 4 was already considered a step down. A fourth-weekend hold around 30% puts this near $10M and $150M+ domestic, comfortably the lowest total the franchise has ever posted. What keeps it out of bomb territory is the math underneath the disappointment: an $85M budget and $358.4M already banked worldwide mean this turns a profit no matter how the domestic run ends.

The scale of the drop-off is the real story. Minions: The Rise of Gru opened to $107M and legged to $370.5M domestic and $937.7M worldwide just four years ago; this one opened at a third of that and will finish at roughly 40% of its domestic total. Illumination is still going to clear $450M worldwide and bank a profit, so call it a letdown, not a disaster, but the brand clearly needs a rethink about what a Minions movie is worth without an event behind it. It is nowhere close to dead, it is just no longer automatic.

Evil Dead Burn is doing what horror does in July, which is vanish fast. It fell 65% in its second weekend the moment The Odyssey showed up, and week three is rarely kinder to a genre that front-loads its whole audience into opening night, so expect roughly a 50% slide to about $2.4M and a cume near $28M. That points to a final around $30M against a $20M budget, and with $50.7M already worldwide it is profitable on paper, but it is a clear miss next to Evil Dead Rise’s $67M domestic in 2023 and never found the second gear that a better-reviewed horror entry might have. Warner Bros. wanted this to hold the horror slot deep into August. Instead it will be an afterthought by the time a new Insidious tries the same trick on August 21.