‘He’s an analog man in a digital AI world’: Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ made back its $250M budget in 3 days without industrywide AI cost cutting

Christopher Nolan doesn’t need a superhero suit, a lightsaber, or a shared universe to sell out movie tickets. Instead, he appears to have enough brand equity to make a nearly three-hour, R-rated adaptation of Homer open bigger than any Batman movie he ever made.

The Odyssey—Nolan’s take on the classic Greek epic about a mythological hero’s boat ride home—raked in $264 million in its opening weekend, clearing its $250 million production budget and topping The Dark Knight Rises, The Dark Knight, and Oppenheimer to become the director’s biggest global debut. 

This is a notable feat for an ancient war epic with no franchise scaffolding or superhero to lean on, making Nolan the closest thing Hollywood has to a “non-IP IP”—a filmmaker whose name functions like a franchise, according to Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends at Rentrak and one of the film industry’s most recognizable experts.  

“It’s an automatic must-see cinematic event when Christopher Nolan’s........

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