Julius Young — Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Vantage
Christopher Nolan is opening a three-hour film based on a 2,700-year-old poem to a projected $200M weekend. The industry has been wrong about the audience this whole time.
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens this weekend to a projected $200 million worldwide opening, which would make it one of the highest-grossing non-franchise openings in box office history. The film is three hours long. It is based on a poem written approximately 2,700 years ago. It does not have a cinematic universe or a sequel greenlit in advance. It has Christopher Nolan and a story that has survived nearly three millennia because it is about something true.
The box office projection is an argument: the audience will show up for an extraordinary film made with craft and ambition. What the audience has rejected is not the theatrical experience. It is the theatrical experience of watching something that feels like content.
The conventional wisdom from the pandemic — that only franchise IP can justify a big-screen release — is being tested this summer by The Odyssey and the Michael Jackson biopic. Neither is a franchise film. Both are tracking toward numbers that the franchise model routinely fails to hit. The Paramount-WBD merger, if it closes, will consolidate the infrastructure that decides what gets made. The artists who want to make films like The Odyssey will need to find a champion inside that structure. The film is a reminder of what the theatrical business is capable of when someone with enough authority decides to try. Related: The Merger That Will Decide What Hollywood Looks Like and Twelve States Can't Stop the Merger