Christopher Nolan’s hotly anticipated adaptation of The Odyssey is set to push the summer box office to pre‑pandemic levels, boosting hopes among cinema executives of a record year in 2026. The film is on track to take more than $200mn in box office opening sales this weekend, according to estimates shared with the FT, putting it ahead of the Oscar‑winning director’s previous hit Oppenheimer three years ago. Sales of between $80mn and $100mn are expected in the US when it opens in 3,900 North American theatres, with a further $110mn likely to be taken in the more than 70 other markets around the world.

Data compiled by Rentrak shows that the summer box office is on course to be the best since before the pandemic in 2019, with an estimated $2.5bn in sales already since the first Friday in May. This is about 7 per cent higher than last year and only just short of the $2.7bn generated in the same period in 2019. “Through May and June [it has been] extraordinarily strong with each month generating over a billion dollars in domestic [US] revenue,” said Paul Dergarabedian, Rentrak’s head of marketplace trends. Tim Richards, chief executive of Vue Cinemas, said that this summer would easily be the biggest since the pandemic, in part due to the opening of The Odyssey, and “has a shot at being the biggest on record”. Vue, which operates cinemas in Europe and the UK, in the first six months of the year made twice what it generated in box office sales during the full year of 2025.

IMAX even developed a new type of camera for Nolan to use on the film. BFI Imax, the UK’s largest screen, sold 28,000 tickets for The Odyssey in 24 hours alone, breaking first‑day‑on‑sale records for the venue with a total gross of £750,000. Oppenheimer took about £254,000 in the same timeframe. Madeleine Mullett, the programme manager at the BFI Imax, said that The Odyssey was tracking higher than Oppenheimer on every metric in the UK, with the cinema near capacity for the first six weeks. Other forthcoming movies are set to lift sales further. At the end of the month, Spider‑Man: Brand New Day is “expected to blow the doors off in its debut weekend”, said Dergarabedian. Later in the year, blockbuster movies include Avengers: Doomsday and the latest instalment of the Dune franchise. The R‑rated Evil Dead Burn further taps into the horror movie resurgence. “We’re pretty confident that this year will break [last year’s] record and will be another best year [for Imax],” said Gelfond. “There’s good movies and lots of them. It is a slate filled with very high‑quality content.”