Remember when The Odyssey was going to flop for being 'woke'? It just passed Furious 7 overseas

The Odyssey has now made about $1.17 billion outside North America, passing Furious 7 to become Universal's biggest international release of all time. Its worldwide total is close to $1.8 billion: $625.5 million domestic, on a reported $250 million budget.

The film opened July 17 to $124.5 million in North America and $264.1 million worldwide. Since then it has become Nolan's highest-grossing film, the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history, passing Deadpool & Wolverine, and Universal's biggest worldwide release, passing Jurassic World in September.

The movie that was supposed to flop

Before anyone had seen a frame, a loud part of the internet had already decided The Odyssey was finished. The case against it went like this:

• The casting: Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, and Elliot Page as Sinon. Critics called it race-swapping and "historically inaccurate," for a story with a Cyclops in it.
• The dialogue: Telemachus calls Odysseus "dad," and the film was reportedly leaning on Emily Wilson's modern translation.
• Musk: after the Nyong'o reports in early 2026, Elon Musk amplified a post complaining about the casting and added his own verdict on X: "Chris Nolan has lost his integrity."
• The AI rival: in July, Musk promised that his Grok Imagine platform would release a full-length, "historically accurate" Odyssey by the end of the year.

Nolan, asked about the pre-release criticism, didn't bother engaging:

"They're always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet."

— Christopher Nolan, to The Telegraph, via OutKick

How it actually went

Nolan's film is about $200 million away from $2 billion. Musk's answer arrived in late October as a seven-minute first episode made with Grok Imagine, which critics mocked for its plastic-looking characters, hard cuts between prompts, and modern English dialogue in a film sold on authenticity. One X user summed up the problem: "It supposed to be historically correct. Why are they talking in English?"

The Odyssey has earned about $1.8 billion. The Musk-backed "historically accurate" version is seven minutes long.

This is the clearest proof of the year that online shouting about "woke" casting doesn't move the box office by a single dollar. The audience that was supposedly boycotting turned out not to exist in any number that shows up in ticket sales, and the people who did buy tickets made this the biggest R-rated movie ever.

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Studios can stop looking over their shoulder at that crowd. What The Odyssey leaves behind is a question for every greenlight meeting in 2027: now that a $250 million Nolan epic took the full force of a culture-war campaign and made $1.8 billion anyway, which films will studios finally be brave enough to make?

Previously we wrote: I wrote Clayface off as DC's Morbius too. Its international numbers say I was wrong