Nolan's 'The Odyssey' Is Tracking Ahead of Oppenheimer. The $250 Million Budget Is the Catch.

The tracking came in for The Odyssey, and it is the kind of number that makes a studio exhale. Deadline reported on June 26 that Christopher Nolan's Homer adaptation is pointing at an $80 million to $100 million domestic opening when it lands July 17. At the same distance from release, that puts it a step ahead of where Oppenheimer was sitting before it went on to win the summer. Then you look at what it cost, and the exhale catches in the throat.

The number, and why the range is so wide

Twenty million dollars is a lot of daylight between the floor and the ceiling of a tracking estimate. That spread is the trackers telling on themselves: nobody has figured out how to call a Nolan opening. Oppenheimer was modeled at $40 million to $50 million in the same window and then opened to $82.4 million, nearly double the low end. A three-hour, R-rated biopic about a physicist was not supposed to do that. Burned once, the forecasters are leaving themselves room on the high side this time, which is how you end up with a range wide enough to drive a Trojan horse through.

The leading indicator under the hood looks strong. In first-choice tracking, the measure of who actually intends to buy a ticket opening weekend rather than who recognizes the title, The Odyssey is running ahead of Oppenheimer and roughly even with Project Hail Mary, which opened to $80.5 million earlier this year. The interest skews toward men over 25. That is Nolan's home crowd, and they show up on Friday rather than waiting for word of mouth.

Presales back it up. IMAX 70mm and the premium large-format seats started selling roughly a year before the movie opens, and the early on-sale pushed enough traffic to strain the AMC app. People are buying the format before they have seen a frame.

The catch is the budget

Here is the part that complicates the good news. The Odyssey carries a reported production budget around $250 million. That is more than double what Oppenheimer cost, and it changes what a given opening weekend actually means. A $90 million debut on a $100 million movie is a studio throwing a party. The same $90 million on a $250 million movie is a studio doing nervous math about how many weekends it has before the theatrical window closes, and how much of the bill marketing is going to add on top.

Nolan movies tend to have long legs, which is the argument for calm. Oppenheimer multiplied its opening more than five times over its domestic run and cleared a billion worldwide. If The Odyssey holds the way Nolan's films usually hold, the budget takes care of itself. The risk is that the front-loaded, format-driven demand that makes the opening look great also means a bigger first-weekend spike and a steeper fall, the way event movies often behave when everyone who cares races to the first show.

What is actually opening

The movie is Nolan's pass at the Odyssey, with Matt Damon as Odysseus working his way home from Troy past the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Calypso. The ensemble around him includes Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, and Anne Hathaway. It is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX's 70mm film cameras, which is the technical bragging right Universal has been leaning on since the cameras were still rolling, and it explains why the format presales matter so much to the math.

It premieres in London on July 6 and opens wide in the United States and the United Kingdom on July 17. Until the actual Friday number lands, the tracking is what everyone has, and the tracking says the audience is there. Whether it is there in the quantity a quarter-billion-dollar myth needs is the question July answers.