Jurassic World Was Universal's Biggest Movie for Eleven Years. A Three-Hour R-Rated Homer Adaptation Just Took the Title.

On Sunday, in its ninth weekend, The Odyssey did something no film had done since June of 2015. It passed Jurassic World. Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer finished the weekend at roughly $1.684 billion worldwide, a hair above the $1.677 billion the dinosaurs banked over their entire run, and it is now the highest-grossing movie Universal Pictures has released in 114 years of releasing movies.

The number is big. The shape of the number is the interesting part. Universal's record used to belong to a sequel in a franchise with four decades of brand equity. It now belongs to a three-hour, R-rated, original screenplay adapted from a poem that is nearly three thousand years old. Nobody planned a toy line.

The record, in plain numbers

• Worldwide: about $1.684 billion after nine weekends, against a reported $250 million budget.
• Domestic: $600.5 million, making it one of only 18 films ever to cross $600 million in North America without adjusting for inflation.
• International: more than $1 billion, the first film that was not a sequel or a remake to do that since Avatar.
• IMAX: more than $457 million, the biggest IMAX run of all time and roughly 29 percent of everything the film has earned.
• Weekend nine: $7.0 million from 1,983 theaters, down only 9 percent from the weekend before.

A nine percent drop in a film's ninth weekend is the kind of hold a movie gets when people are going back, not when they are discovering it. It has been in theaters since July 17, which we covered in our opening weekend piece, and it was still the third biggest movie in the country on the weekend a new Sandra Bullock sequel opened at number one.

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What Jurassic World had that this did not

Jurassic World opened on June 12, 2015 with a $208 million domestic weekend, a record at the time, on top of a 22-year-old brand, a PG-13 rating, a summer with no real competition, and Chris Pratt at the exact peak of Chris Pratt. It was a four-quadrant machine built to do what it did. It also had eleven years and nobody to challenge it. Universal's next biggest films in that span were Furious 7 and Jurassic World's own sequel.

The Odyssey opened to $123.5 million against a Spider-Man that would go on to post the biggest weekend in history one week later. It is rated R, which historically caps a global ceiling around a billion dollars. The previous R-rated record belonged to Deadpool and Wolverine at about $1.34 billion, and that film had two of the most bankable superheroes on the planet. Nolan's film has Matt Damon in a beard and a cyclops.

Where it sits on Nolan's own list

Before this summer, Nolan's career-best was The Dark Knight Rises at about $1.08 billion, followed by The Dark Knight at just over $1 billion once you count re-releases, then Oppenheimer at roughly $976 million. Inception sits near $837 million and Interstellar has crept past $700 million on the strength of its IMAX anniversary runs.

The Odyssey is now ahead of The Dark Knight Rises by about $600 million, which is to say the gap between his first-place film and his second-place film is bigger than the entire gross of Dunkirk. Deadline noted that the total beats The Dark Knight Rises even after adjusting that film for inflation, which is the comparison that usually humbles modern records. It is his third billion-dollar film and his first without Batman in it.

It is also his best-reviewed. The Rotten Tomatoes score settled at 95 percent with a 97 percent audience score, and the Metacritic score of 89 tops The Dark Knight and Memento. Box office records and career-best reviews rarely arrive together. When they do, the film tends to stay at the top of a director's ranked list for a long time.

The IMAX part is the actual story

The Odyssey is the first feature ever shot entirely with IMAX cameras, and the format has returned the favor. Its $457 million in IMAX ticket sales is more than double what Avatar did in the format in 2009, and the 70mm film prints alone, the exact format Nolan shot on, have sold about $66 million in tickets from a tiny number of screens. IMAX extended the 70mm run through the end of September because people are still buying out the shows.

Nearly three dollars of every ten the film has earned came from a premium screen. That is the argument Nolan has been making since The Dark Knight put six sequences on IMAX cameras in 2008: give people a reason the theater is different from the living room, and they will pay for the difference. This summer he proved it at a scale that makes the counterargument hard to hear.

What it means for the rest of 2026

The Odyssey is the second biggest film of 2026 and the twelfth biggest of all time. The only film ahead of it this year is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which took the all-time domestic record over the same weekend and sits at about $2.5 billion worldwide. We wrote about the end of The Force Awakens' ten-year reign when that happened.

The two records together tell the summer's whole story, which we tallied in our summer 2026 box office scorecard. A beloved brand with a great movie behind it set one record. A director with no brand except his own name set the other. Deadline's tally puts The Odyssey as the third biggest non-franchise film in history, and the two ahead of it, Avatar and Titanic, were both called reckless bets before they opened.

A generational event that galvanizes moviegoing itself.Donna Langley, Universal Pictures, via TheWrap

How to see it before the record run ends

• IMAX 70mm runs through the end of September at the handful of theaters that can project it. If you are near one, this is the version the movie was built for.
• IMAX digital and premium large format screens are still carrying it in most cities, and the ninth-weekend hold suggests they will keep it through October.
• Digital purchase and rental arrives November 17, four months after release, a longer window than almost any studio film gets now.
• Peacock has no announced date. Universal's usual pattern puts it around four months after digital, so plan on early 2027.

Jurassic World had a good run, and whether it was ever the best film in its own series is a debate that lives on our Jurassic Park movies ranked page. The bigger argument now is the Nolan one. Thirteen features, three of them past a billion dollars, and a new film that critics and audiences both put at the top. Rank them head to head on Shortlist, share the list, and see whether the community agrees that a Homer adaptation belongs above The Dark Knight. That is a harder call than the box office makes it look.

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