《The Odyssey》IMAX预售创纪录并预计首周末全球票房超2亿美元

‘The Odyssey’ leads the box office charge for a record 2026
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.
He added that The Odyssey was “a film that looms large on the horizon prepping to hit big screens” after a summer dominated by family hits such as Disney’s Toy Story 5 and horror movies such as Backrooms.
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. “When I say we are back . . . we are back,” Richards said.
He added that this year was the first to return to normal levels of moviemaking by the big studios after the end of the pandemic and the Hollywood strikes of 2023. “This is the first year that Hollywood is fully back on. They are producing films at an unprecedented level.”
Richards said that The Odyssey was already driving strong presales, describing it as “an extraordinary film”. The three-hour movie has won critical acclaim and is racking up sellout shows, in particular at the Imax cinemas around the world it was created for.
The Odyssey, which was the first feature to be shot entirely on Imax cameras, has achieved Imax’s highest presales of all time, according to Richard Gelfond, the company’s chief executive.
Many Imax locations have already sold out showtimes through the first five weeks of the film’s release. Imax even developed a new type of camera for Nolan to use on the film. “This is the most involvement we’ve ever had in a movie,” said Gelfond. “It was filmed with Imax cameras. The sets were designed in a way to maximise the Imax field of vision and the much bigger screen, and was edited in Imax.”
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.”
The summer box office spree is one of the high points of a strong year for cinema, reflecting the extent to which people are returning to theatres to watch movies on release despite the ubiquity of streaming platforms.
In the year to July 12, more than $5.1bn was made at the US box office, the highest level since 2019 and up more than one-tenth on last year.
Michael, the Michael Jackson biopic backed like The Odyssey by NBCUniversal, has surpassed $1bn in worldwide box office, making it the highest-grossing biopic of all time worldwide. The latest Super Mario Movie also generated more than $1bn globally — a level expected to be reached by Toy Story 5 — while movies such as The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Project Hail Mary performed well.
There have also been more disappointing sales from movies such as the live-action version of Moana, Supergirl and the recent Star Wars spin-off, Mandalorian and Grogu.
But Richards said that even these marked what would have previously been regarded as a normal year for cinema: a few misses that were countered by a greater number of hits.
Mullett said: “There are a lot of titles for everyone,” predicting that more people than usual would repeatedly go back to the cinema for the latest movie release this year. “They are demanding an audience to come back.”