The media continues to try and pump up Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, with Fortune magazine jumping into the game with the false claim that the movie has already earned back its estimated $250 million production budget.
Hailing Nolan for not needing AI or much by way of computer generated effects, Fortune published its July 21 article entitled, “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.”
The article begins celebrating the director, and saying, “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.”
Then the piece makes a major false claim.
“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.”
While it is true that Odyssey is Nolan’s biggest opening, it is flatly untrue that the box office take has already “cleared its $250 million production budget.”
There is no disputing the box office take, granted. But about half that take will not go to the studios to recoup the film’s budget. It is an industry standard that half of a box office take goes to the theaters showing the film. After all, multiplexes have to make money, too.
That means the debut take for Nolan’s film in its opening weekend is roughly about $132 million. That makes the opening weekend’s box office more than $100 million short of making back its production costs. The film’s promotional budget, by the way, is a reported $125 million.
The Fortune article goes on to make another wild overstatement about the drawing power of the director’s name.
“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,” the article states.
This is quite an under estimation of the story Nolan is telling in his film. The Odyssey is not some disconnected, little-known tale from the shadowy past. It is one of the most famous fantasy tales of human literature, one that has been adapted thousands of times in a myriad of media from movies, to TV, to books, to comics, to music, to — well, just about every media there ever has been. And it is a tale that will continue to serve as the basis for new re-tellings like it has been for nearly 3,000 years already.
So, it isn’t as if Nolan pulled on some obscure tale that no one has ever heard of and rode to box office success merely on the strength of his name, here.
The rest of the article treats on the lack of CGI and AI techniques and touts Nolan’s reliance on practical effects and old-fashioned filmmaking, something that the article claims is “a direct counterweight to the moment Hollywood is having with AI.”
Certainly, that is a legitimate point. But to claim that his film is so successful it made back its full budget in three days is simply not true. For that to have happened, Nolan’s movie would have to have made no less than $500 million on its opening weekend. And it absolutely did not do that — not yet.
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