The Odyssey Is Universal’s Biggest Film Ever, in Dollars Only

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey crossed $1.684 billion worldwide this week and took the title of Universal's highest-grossing release ever, displacing Jurassic World's decade-old $1.671 billion.

The record is real. It was crossed on tracker actuals rather than studio estimates, which is rarer than it should be, and the trades were if anything conservative about calling it. The margin is about $13 million.

It is also a record that exists entirely because nobody adjusts for inflation, and one outlet said so plainly while most of the pickups quietly dropped the caveat.

Jurassic World in money that means the same thing

Apply the consumer price index from 2015 to now — a multiplier of roughly 1.41 — and Jurassic World's $1.671 billion becomes something in the region of $2.36 billion in today's money.

The Odyssey is about 29 percent behind that. It is not a close race in real terms, and it will not become one.

The caveat on the caveat: applying a US price index to a worldwide gross is a rough proxy, because most of that money was earned in other currencies and other inflation environments. It is directionally right and precisely wrong, which is true of every inflation-adjusted box office figure ever published, including the ones used to argue that Gone with the Wind still leads everything.

The numbers that are actually holding up

Strip out the nominal-dollar record and there are three claims here that survive contact:

• $600.5 million domestic, $1.084 billion international. The international side is where this film became unusual
• The all-time R-rated record, and not narrowly. The rating checks out, and at $1.684 billion it clears Deadpool & Wolverine's $1.338 billion by roughly $346 million. It is the first R-rated film past $1.5 billion at all
• IMAX ticket sales past $450 million. Note that an earlier and much-repeated figure of $289 million is from August and has been superseded — it is still the number most aggregators carry

But the genuinely remarkable stat is the one getting the least attention, because it requires a sentence with three negations in it: The Odyssey is the first film that is not a sequel and not a remake to gross over a billion dollars outside the United States and Canada since Avatar.

That is a seventeen-year gap. Seventeen years in which every single film to clear a billion internationally on its own was attached to something that already existed. On a $250 million budget, from an original-to-screen adaptation of a three-thousand-year-old poem, that is a considerably stranger achievement than out-grossing a dinosaur film in unadjusted dollars.

Which Universal, exactly

A smaller question nobody has answered in print: does "Universal's highest-grossing release" mean Universal-distributed or Universal-produced?

It matters in principle, because a distributed-title list drags in everything the studio put through its pipeline without financing — Illumination's animated output, Amblin co-productions, the Legendary arrangements. Produced-only is a much shorter list.

In this specific case the distinction changes nothing, because there is no title sitting between the two. The next names down are Furious 7 at roughly $1.516 billion, The Super Mario Bros. Movie at $1.362 billion, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom at $1.310 billion. The Odyssey is first on either definition.

There is a nice symmetry buried in it, though. Jurassic World was a Universal, Amblin and Legendary co-production — three parties sharing the cost and the upside. The Odyssey is Universal and Nolan's own Syncopy. A film the studio largely owns has displaced a film it largely rented.

What the record is measuring

An all-time gross record is a measurement of ticket prices as much as of audiences, and the gap widens every year the comparison ages. Every re-release folded into a lifetime total inflates the older film's number while the newer one is still on its first run. Premium formats — and this film leaned on IMAX 70mm harder than almost anything in the last decade — mean a single admission can be worth two.

None of that makes the record fake. It makes it a record about dollars, which is what it says on the tin and not what it is read as. "Biggest film Universal has ever released" and "most people who have ever gone to see a Universal film" are different sentences, and only one of them is being printed.

Universal has been making films for a hundred and fourteen years. In its own accounting, the biggest thing it has ever put out is a three-hour Homer adaptation rated R. That is a perfectly good story without the arithmetic being wrong.