The first seven months of 2026 have already made it cinema’s best year since the Covid-19 pandemic.
08 Aug, 2026
After a hugely successful three weeks in cinemas that saw large numbers of advance bookings and packed theatres worldwide, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has reached the coveted $1 billion mark in global sales.
The film released on July 17 and has generated $429.65 million in the US and $578.8m internationally for a grand total just over $1bn. It is Nolan’s first film to cross the coveted threshold since 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises made a total of $1.08bn during its theatrical run.
Imax screens — for which the movie was shot — contributed $257m to the movie’s sales figures, and The Odyssey is expected to become the highest grossing film ever on Imax screens.
With the film still in cinemas, The Odyssey is also expected to surpass The Dark Knight Rises to become the director’s highest grossing film. His last film, Oppenheimer, managed $975m in ticket sales.
This comes as The Odyssey is set to open in China — the world’s largest moviegoing market — on Friday, likely giving its numbers a massive boost. The film will play across nearly 800 Imax screens in the country and thousands of standard cinemas.
The Odyssey is the fifth movie this year to cross the $1bn mark after Spider-Man: Brand New Day ($1.18 billion and counting), Toy Story 5 ($1.067 billion), The Super Mario Galaxy Movie ($1.001 billion) and Michael ($1.001 billion) — which beat Oppenheimer to become the highest-grossing biopic of all time.
This marks a milestone in the revival of cinema after the Covid-19 pandemic, with 2026 having the most billion-dollar films of any year after the pandemic. The all-time record year for high-rolling movies was in 2019, when nine movies made over a billion dollars in sales.
