On the Sunday night of The Odyssey‘s opening weekend, Paul Dergarabedian managed to get tickets to a 70mm showing at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—a packed house, the format filmmaker Christopher Nolan had insisted the film be seen in. Before the feature, a title card appeared on screen: Denis Villeneuve, thanking Nolan for letting the audience see four minutes of exclusive footage for the next anticipated blockbuster: December’s Dune: Part Three.
“The audience erupted,” Dergarabedian recalled. “That was mind-blowing.”
इससे जुड़ी जानकारी
He’d already seen The Odyssey on its first showing, the Thursday prior, but saw it again that Sunday. “That’s a lot of hours,” he said, adding that he may yet go to see it again. But the scene at Grauman’s—the 70mm, the Villeneuve card, the crowd’s response—stayed with him as the clearest evidence of something he’d been watching build all summer.
“This is a memory moment,” he said. “A touchstone moment.”
Dergarabedian, a longtime box office analyst and head of marketplace trends at Rentrak, has watched a lot of summers come and go. He’s been at this a while, noting that he covered the milestone releases of both Jurassic Park in 1993 and Avengers: Endgame in 2019.
“I’ve seen it all,” he told Fortune. “And this year—between the unexpected indie surprises and then the blockbuster success—there’s an incredible mix of films.” With Spider-Man: Brand New Day set to open even bigger on July 31, tracking toward $200 million to $250 million domestically, it’s a boom that has room to run.
The purest statistical milestone
For Dergarabedian, the number that mattered most wasn’t The Odyssey‘s opening, even though that was undeniably a blockbuster result, cementing Nolan’s standing as the rare director who can open an R-rated, nearly three-hour original epic on scale. It was what happened the following weekend.
Studio estimates on Sunday morning put the Odyssey‘s second-weekend drop at around 30%, with roughly $87 million in ticket sales. As final numbers came in, that figure crept up to $90 million—tightening the decline to about 27%.
“That’s nothing for a movie that opened that big,” Dergarabedian said, explaining that major tentpoles routinely fall 50% or more in their second frames. This kind of hold puts The Odyssey in the same conversation as Top Gun: Maverick and Obsession when it comes to legs. It’s already near $700 million globally and climbing; by the end of the weekend, Dergarabedian expects it to be pushing $800 million.
“They’re not gonna let that thing leave theaters until it hits $1 billion,” he said.
He traced the hold to “word of mouth doing the heavy lifting” — people reading about the film’s success and not wanting to be left out, “just like appointment television used to be.” The FOMO factor is real for the movies this year, he concluded.
“People were going out on Sunday night [to see this],” he said. “That’s a real thing.”
The observation lands differently in 2026 from it would have a decade ago. For roughly 20 years, prestige migrated steadily away from the multiplex and toward the living room. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad established television as the medium where the cultural water-cooler moments lived; the streaming era that followed doubled down on that logic, until the sheer proliferation of prestige content made appointment viewing nearly impossible. There was too much to keep up with, and all of it was available whenever.
The Odyssey‘s second-weekend hold is a television-era metric applied to a movie—what happens when audiences feel they’ll be left out of a conversation if they don’t show up. Appointment culture has gone back to the future: the multiplex.
Spider-Man as pressure point
If The Odyssey lit the fuse, Spider-Man is the looming detonation. Brand New Day doesn’t open until July 31, but tracking has it in the $230 million to $250 million range domestically, which would make it the biggest opening weekend of 2026. Dergarabedian has seen enough to offer a prediction: “Spider-Man’s gonna blow the doors off.”
What makes the matchup unusual is its intimacy. Zendaya, Tom Holland, and Jon Bernthal all appear in both The Odyssey and Brand New Day, creating a back-to-back star run that Dergarabedian compared to Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, or Warren B…
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